Authors
Mengchen Dong, Jan-Willem Van Prooijen, Song Wu, Yanjun Zhang, Shenghua Jin
Publication date
2019/1/2
Journal
The international journal for the psychology of religion
Volume
29
Issue
1
Pages
1-17
Publisher
Routledge
Description
Based on Terror Management Theory (TMT), we suggest that spirituality and prosocial attitudes toward money have a similar defensive function in resisting existential anxiety. In mortality salient (MS) situations, both spirituality and prosocial money attitudes afford symbolic immortality by self-transcendent connections. In four studies, we found that activating death awareness weakened people’s subjective love of money (Study 1) and predicted increased spending willingness on prosocial rather than proself goals (Studies 2, 3, and 4). More importantly, MS effects on money attitudes were smaller when people’s trait spirituality was high (vs. low; Studies 1, 2, 3) and when people were primed to experience spirituality (vs. happiness control condition; Study 4). For low spirituality people, the association between MS and prosocial spending also depended on the capacity of money spending to contribute positively to one …
Total citations
20202021202220233511
Scholar articles
M Dong, JW Van Prooijen, S Wu, Y Zhang, S Jin - The international journal for the psychology of religion, 2019