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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Mediating roles of karma and self-enhancement in the effect
of religious and spiritual primes on bystanders' reporting
intention
Sidharth Muralidharan
Temerlin Advertising Institute, Southern
Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, USA
Correspondence
Sidharth Muralidharan, Temerlin Advertising
Institute, Southern Methodist University,
P.O. Box 750113, Dallas, TX 75275, USA.
Email: sidmurali@smu.edu
Funding information
Meadows School of the Arts at Southern
Methodist University; Temerlin Advertising
Institute at Southern Methodist University
Abstract
Religious priming promotes engagement in prosocial action; however, findings about
spiritual priming are relatively scant. Using Hindu (India) and Christian (U.S.) partici-
pants, a two-part study was conducted. The aim of the first part (i.e., Study 1) was to
observe which motives to volunteer (i.e., egoistic or altruistic) related to religiosity
and spirituality. Findings show that religiosity had a positive impact on egoistic
volunteering, while spirituality had a positive impact on altruistic volunteering. The
aim of the second part (i.e., Study 2) was to apply the findings from Study 1 to test
priming effects in public service announcements about domestic violence prevention.
The mediating effects of karma and self-enhancement in the relationship between
religiosity or spirituality and reporting intention were also examined. Findings show
that the religious ad was more effective than the spiritual ad in priming religiosity and
spirituality among Hindus; that is, karma mediated the effect of religiosity and spiritu-
ality on their reporting intention. Among Christians, spiritual primes were effective,
and self-enhancement mediated the impact of spirituality on reporting intention; at
the same time, religious primes led to the direct impact of religiosity and spirituality
on reporting intention. Overall, the apparent efficacy of religious and spiritual priming
is promising, and the findings indicate the significance of spirituality in domestic vio-
lence prevention messaging. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.
KEYWORDS
karma, priming, public service announcements, religiosity, self-enhancement, spirituality
1|INTRODUCTION
Factors that influence consumer behaviour is an important area of
study (Paul & Bhukya, 2021), and one such factor is ‘beliefs.’For
example, trust is a positive belief that has been found to influence
purchase intentions (Chakraborty et al., 2022). Beliefs inform behav-
iour, and religion and its beliefs, provide a framework that can spur
pro-social action.
Though altruistic tendencies exist, previous findings indicate that
volunteering among the religious stems from egoistic motives. For exam-
ple, maintaining a strong social network positively influenced formal
volunteering or volunteering guided by religious membership (van Tienen
et al., 2011). In this way, volunteering can enhance one's social network
(Becker & Dhingra, 2001). On the contrary, spirituality closely relates to
altruism (Saroglou, 2013), but findings about the influence of spirituality
on volunteering are relatively scant. Therefore, we divided the current
study into two parts. The first part (i.e., Study 1) was a preliminary explo-
ration of two factors (i.e., egoism and altruism) important to religiosity
and spirituality that might motivate volunteering. The purpose of the
second part (i.e., Study 2) was to apply the findings of Study 1 to a
behavioural outcome (i.e., bystander intervention) of priming cues in
health messaging about domestic violence prevention.
Received: 28 September 2021 Revised: 13 April 2022 Accepted: 25 April 2022
DOI: 10.1111/ijcs.12820
Int J Consum Stud. 2023;47:189–201. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ijcs © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 189