Jessica Paek, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto and Kimberly Wade-Benzoni ran four preregistered studies with 3,656 participants, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science in 2025. Before allocating wealth among possible beneficiaries, some participants completed a brief reflection on how their lives would impact future generations. That reflection shifted allocations away from relational beneficiaries (family members) and toward collectivistic ones, charities. The researchers call it the Andrew Carnegie Effect. People do not consider legacy narrowly because they have weighed the options. They consider it narrowly because nobody invited them to look wider, and the invitation is easy. These allocations were hypothetical, so hold the effect loosely, but the mechanism is the point: the family-first default is a construal, not a constraint.

The engine underneath it is older and stranger. Wade-Benzoni and colleagues showed in Psychological Science in 2012 that people ordinarily shortchange future beneficiaries relative to present ones, and that priming thoughts of death reversed the pattern. Reminded of mortality, people became more generous to the future, not less, because death awareness activates the drive to have a lasting impact. Mortality is not the obstacle in legacy giving. Handled wrong it triggers avoidance; handled right it is the fuel. So all those admonitions to avoid ‘death’ language may have been a broadsword when we needed a scalpel.

And when the invitation lands inside the right moment, it moves real will writing. In the field experiment run through a legal call centre, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Michael Sanders and Sarah Smith had will-writers add a short prompt during the will-making conversation (Sanders & Smith, 2016). The version with social and emotional framing, many customers like to do this, and are there causes you are passionate about, raised charitable inclusion by 50 percent, an effect the authors size at one-third of a 40 percent estate tax incentive. One boundary: clients with children barely moved, which is the Carnegie construal showing up in live decisions, stronger than in the lab.

You likely know the background here, because it is the most-cited work in planned giving: Dr. Russell James's fMRI study of bequest decision-making, which found bequest decisions running on autobiographical machinery, the brain writing its final chapter, and his phrasing research showing that death references suppress interest while "causes that have been important in your life" strengthens it. If you’re not following Dr. James on Linkedin, that’s your start. I am still honored that he was one of the first endorsements for Neurogiving.

The new work adds to the James research: what the reflection actually does. The 2025 and 2012 results say legacy prompts operate on the brain's construal of who counts, widening the circle of moral concern the way I describe identity formation working in Neurogiving, and they say mortality salience is the amplifier that makes future-directed generosity feel urgent rather than optional. The Peak-End Rule gives this its emotional shape. Endings carry disproportionate weight in how the brain values an experience, and a bequest is the one ending a donor authors on purpose. So the fundraising practitioner’s job is sequencing: reflection first, so the life review opens the circle; mortality in the background, where it powers the decision instead of triggering the flinch.

A reframe to carry into your next planning meeting: stop treating the family-first objection as a verdict and start treating it as a construal you arrived too late to shape. The Carnegie studies suggest the window is before the allocation hardens, which in practice means before the will exists.

So this week, find out where your program actually meets donors relative to that moment. Pull your last ten legacy conversations or inquiries and mark each one: did the donor already have a will when you arrived? If most did, your program is negotiating against a written default, the hardest version of the job. The design question worth one honest conversation is how to be present earlier, at the narrative moments when the construal is still liquid, a retirement, a loss, the appointment where the will finally gets drafted, and what a two-minute reflection invitation would look like in each of them.

Research Sources

In Lab Notes Pro

The Pro edition goes to the strange heart of this literature: what precisely warmed people toward charity, and its overlooked second finding, that death reminders moved money only to causes inside the giver's own worldview. Alongside it, a study showing mortality reminders boost generosity only for people with a specific identity and the legacy-priming experiment that moved real donations. Plus the context table, three named failure modes, and a runnable experiment for your this month’s legacy mailing.