Secular Examination of Spirituality-Prosociality Association

Abstract

Religious beliefs in Chinese cultural background, especially in Chinese secular society, have rarely been systematically investigated. The nonreligious-based population in China endorses certain supernatural beliefs or has related transcendent experience, even though they usually claim themselves as non-believers. Therefore, the current research examined the spirituality-prosociality association in Chinese secular background, demonstrating how spiritual connection with the transcendence related to individual secular social life. A total of 440 Chinese participants completed our questionnaires in three survey studies. The results showed that: 1) for the nonreligious-based population in China, spirituality was positively connected with personal prosocial trait, prosocial attitude, and prosocial behavior; 2) the prosocial trait of compassionate love partially mediated the association between spirituality and daily prosocial expenses on time and money; and 3) personal emphasis on moral principles such as ultimate justice beliefs partially mediated the association between spirituality and interpersonal altruism in organizational settings. Limitations and future directions were discussed.

The moderating role of career adaptability on the relationship between workplace spirituality and employee mental and physical health

“…Finally, our study illustrates the importance of career adaptability away from factors such as a person's career success, satisfaction and well-being (Dong et al, 2017;Savickas, 1997;Savickas & Porfeli, 2012) to focus on employee mental and physical health outcomes. As observed, in the presence of career adaptability, the impact of workplace spirituality on employee mental health is large (Cohen's f 2 = 0.43).…”

“…In essence, issues such as spirituality can be linked to workrelated outcomes, potentially affecting employees' general well-being (Dong, Wu, Zhu, Jin, & Zhang, 2017). Ashmos and Duchon (2000) defined workplace spirituality as nourishing the inner life through their work.…”

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

“…Different from previous studies, we found a marginal trend in Study 3 that high spirituality participants intended to donate more in the control than the mortality salient condition, qualified by both the two-way interaction between MS and spirituality and their two-way interaction in the selfsuperior context. This trend may be attributed to the general relationship between spirituality and prosocial tendencies, including helping, donating, and volunteering (Dong et al, 2017;Galen, 2012). Supporting this proposition, we found a strong positive spirituality-prosociality association in the control (B = 144.92, SE = 50.72, t = 2.86, p = 0.006, ηp 2 = 0.107) but not in the mortality salient (B = −29.00, SE = 41.68, p = 0.48) condition, which might also contribute to the strong main effect of spirituality on prosocial spending in the self-inferior context.…”

“…Religious belief may mitigate death anxiety by promising an afterlife and literal immortality (Dechesne et al, 2003;Vail et al, 2010), while many nonreligious people-particularly Atheists-reject ideas of an afterlife (Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006;Vail et al, 2012). Religious affiliations may be based on ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility (Ginges, Hansen, & Norenzayan, 2009;Preston & Ritter, 2013;Vail et al, 2012); spirituality, however, is uniquely connected with unboundedly transcendent feeling of compassion (Saslow et al, 2013), value of universalism (Saroglou & Galand, 2004), belief in ultimate justice (Dong et al, 2017), and prosocial behavior toward general but not close others (Preston & Ritter, 2013). Therefore, spirituality provides people with a broader frame of personal meaning-making, and helps people obtain symbolic immortality through connecting self-worth with transcendence (Piedmont, 1999;Piff et al, 2015;Van Cappellen et al, 2013).…”

“…In four studies sampling from non-WEIRD (that is, not as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) and largely nonreligious (Dong, Wu, Zhu, Jin, & Zhang, 2017) populations from China, we aim to make a novel contribution by investigating how spirituality would moderate MS effects on people's prosocial attitudes toward money. We examine spirituality and prosocial attitudes toward money as two complementary selftranscendent worldview defenses, and hypothesize that spirituality, as a culturally universal (Dong et al, 2017) and religiosity-independent (Zinnbauer & Pargament, 2005) construct, shields against death anxiety, thereby decreasing the need for alternative cultural defensive mechanisms such as prosocial attitudes toward money. In the following, we first review the literature on (a) mortality salience and prosocial attitudes toward money and (b) mortality salience and spirituality.…”