ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Evolutionary Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1568204
Life-history Strategy, Adverse Environment, and Justification of Life-ending Decisions
Provisionally accepted
- Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China
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Do people's perceptions of living in a harsh or unpredictable environment influence their judgments about life-ending decisions? Evidence has been limited regarding the interplay between childhood environment, as reflected by life-history calibration, and the current environment, as well as their joint influence on cognitive judgments about life-ending decisions. Drawing on life-history theory, we propose that life-history trade-offs along the fast-slow continuum are associated with the subjective justification of life-ending decisions.We further hypothesized that the current state of the environment, including harshness and unpredictability, moderates this relationship. In Study 1, we administered a vignette questionnaire to Chinese young adults (N = 147) to investigate the relationships between lifehistory traits, current environmental adversity, and the subjective justification of life-ending decisions, specifically regarding suicide and assisted suicide (euthanasia practices). We tested the same hypothesis as in Study 1 by analyzing cross-country data from the World Values Survey (N = 6,766; Study 2). Structural equation models were applied to examine the associations described above. The results show that individuals with a slow life-history strategy are less likely to subjectively justify life-ending behaviors (Study 2), and this association is moderated by current environmental adversity (Studies 1 and 2). This study highlights the role of cognitive judgment in life-ending decisions as influenced by LH orientation, and demonstrates that this association is linked to individual variation in response to current environments. Implications for future intervention programs and the specific advantages of ecological adaptation arising from some degree of environmental adversity and uncertainty are discussed.
Keywords: Life History, Adverse environment, life-ending decisions, Cognitive judgment, World Values Survey
Received: 29 Jan 2025; Accepted: 07 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Guo and Lu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hui Jing Lu, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China
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