Prosocial Attitudes toward Money from Terror Management Perspective: Death Transcendence through Spirituality

Abstract

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 selftranscendent 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's feelings of self-worth (Study 3). Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed. Death is an inescapable fate for all human beings. Terror Management Theory (TMT; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991) posits that personal awareness of one's own mortality prompts existential anxiety, leading people to support values that are consistent with their own cultural worldviews (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010; Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997). Amongst the psychological mechanisms to protect the self against the awareness of death, religion and supernatural beliefs have long been considered as effective means to ward off existential anxiety (Norenzayan &

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