How Do We Remember Close Connections? Gender and Age Differences in Legacy Identified via 38 Million Obituaries

How we live dictates how we will be remembered. Crucially, studying how our legacy endures may reveal new philosophical and psychological insights about human nature and social phenomena. In the current investigation, we present a large-scale analysis of over 38 million obituaries spanning nearly 30 years (1998-2024) and comprising nearly 7 billion words. Through dictionary-based natural language processing techniques, we map the moral and emotional landscape of these obituaries to investigate differences in how people are memorialized by gender and age. We find that men and older people were remembered with more words; women were remembered more for caring for others (in the case of love and friendship), whereas men were remembered more in contexts reflecting a lack of care (e.g., war, conflict), and this gender asymmetry intensified with age. The present work may be the first large-scale analysis of obituaries building toward a psychology of legacy.