Waley

Running head: SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCE AND DECISION-MAKING STYLES 1

The Relationship of Spiritual Intelligence and Decision-Making Styles of College Students

Pia Roelen C. Pahati

Bulacan State University

SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCE AND DECISION-MAKING STYLES 2

The Relationship of Spiritual Intelligence and Decision-Making Styles of College Students

Spiritual intelligence is one of the most controversial psychological construct today.

Gardner (1993) as cited in King (2008) disagreed when spiritual intelligence was proposed to be

a part of his Multiple Intelligences. He even noted that intelligence should not be confounded

with an individual’s phenomenological experience, noting for most that spirituality involves

certain feelings of relatedness to a higher being. However, he himself made use of the

phenomenological experiences, such as the emotionality often involved in music, mathematics or

even personal intelligence. In a newer sense, Zohar and Marshall (2000), described spiritual

intelligence as the ultimate intelligence in which they placed it at the top of their hierarchy

model, undermining EQ and IQ. They noted that spiritual intelligence or what they termed as SQ

helps us to assess the most meaningful course of action that we people do especially when

solving our problems. In accordance to their claim that SQ is the ultimate intelligence of people,

Emmons (2000), describes spiritual intelligence as the way of people to adapt and to facilitate

everyday problem solving and goal attainment through the utilization of the spiritual

information.

However, there had been a misunderstanding when it comes to spirituality and spiritual

intelligence. To date spirituality has offered a wide variety of definitions for the term spirituality

(Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003). Generally, spirituality refers to the concern with or connection

to a transcendent being and often includes an individual’s search for an ultimate purpose in life

(Fry,2003). Mitroff and Denton (1999, p. 15) defined spirituality as ‘‘the basic desire to find

ultimate meaning and purpose in one’s life and to live an integrated life. Nonetheless, the fact

that spirituality is often indistinguishable from one's beliefs (religious or otherwise) says nothing


about spiritual intelligence. Simply put, these two constructs are not one in the same (King,

2008).

Spiritual intelligence, based on the Model of Spiritual Intelligence of King (2008), states

that spiritual intelligence is by far an ‘intelligence’ as it has fulfilled all established criteria for an

intelligence: (1) it involves a set of interrelated mental capacities, as opposed to preferred ways

of behaving, which are distinct from other mental abilities and manifest to varying degrees

across the human population; (2) it appears to develop over the lifespan, emerging in childhood

and adolescence and, in many cases, continuing into old age; (3) it clearly facilitates adaptation

and problem-solving, not only in specific contexts (e.g., the existential crisis) but in a diverse

number of stressful situations; (4) it both involves and contributes to abstract-reasoning, aiding in

decision-making, judgments, appraisals, and planning; (5) although limited, it has demonstrated

potential biological foundations in the brain; (6) it has further displayed a high evolutionary

plausibility, likely playing a critical role in the recent history of our species; and (7) although

others have fallen short (e.g., Amram, 2007; Emmons, 2000a), the current model of spiritual

intelligence assembles capacities for which cognition and mental computation are theoretically

paramount.

Basing on the assumption of King (2008) that spiritual intelligence “involves and

contributes to abstract-reasoning, aiding in decision-making, judgments, appraisals, and

planning” (p. 121). It is therefore related to decision-making styles of individuals. However, this

assumption is still not tested using spiritual intelligence as the intelligence construct, as most of

the studies that have been conducted only tested it using emotional and intelligence quotients.

In our everyday lives, we are bombarded with different circumstances which requires us

the constant need to makes decisions. Although the decisions that we are all making are vastly


different from each other, researchers claimed that we, individuals have the habitual tendencies

to approach various problems in consistently similar ways, which was referred to as the decision-

making styles (Wood, 2012). However, decision-making styles that we usually made are affected

by three factors—decision features, situational factors and individual differences (Appelt, Milch,

Handgraaf & Weber, 2012; Thunholm, 2004).

As stated by Appelt et al. (2012), individual differences is a “broad term, covering any

variable that differs between people, from decision style to cognitive ability to personality” (p.

253). Cognitive style in decision-making often refers to the individual thinking of the persons

and is usually based on the person itself. College students in their senior years are faced with

many decision-making situations. In real world, this is the time that they are going to decide

what will they be in their future lives. Their choices of their future occupations for themselves as

they enter their intended future careers. More so, senior college students are the young adults

who must be prepared to make big or small decisions in their lives (DiDonato & Strough, 2013).

With that, this study will focus on finding if there is a relationship between spiritual

intelligence and decision-making styles of university instructors and professors.

Spiritual Intelligence

David King (2008) defined spiritual intelligence as “a set of mental capacities which

contribute to the awareness, integration, and adaptive application of the nonmaterial and

transcendent aspects of one's existence, leading to such outcomes as deep existential reflection,

enhancement of meaning, recognition of a transcendent self, and mastery of spiritual states”

(p.54). Four core components are proposed to comprise spiritual intelligence: (1) critical

existential thinking, (2) personal meaning production, (3) transcendental awareness, and (4)

conscious state expansion.


According to King (2008), critical existential thinking, the first construct of his model

refers to capacity of the person to critically contemplate the nature of existence, reality, the

universe, space, time, death, and other existential or metaphysical issues. From a basic

perspective, existential thinking refers to thinking about one’s existence, like death and afterlife

(Nasel, 2004). As previously established, such existential thinking is commonplace in definitions

of spirituality (Koenig & Larson, 2000; Matheis, Tulsky & Matheis R., 2006; Wink & Dillon,

2002) as well as spiritual intelligence (Nasel, 2004; Vaughan, 2002; Wolman, 2001; Zohar &

Marshall, 2000). It was also assumed in his model that critical existential thinking can serve as a

multifaceted source of adaptation, coping, problem-solving, and abstract reasoning, particularly

in crises of an existential nature or in those crises which arouse such existential anxieties and

questions. This is accomplished by allowing an individual to critically analyze such issues and

circumstances, thereby more readily solving the existential frustration and averting its side

effects. It is further contended that there is no limit to such application, as any problem can be

approached from an existential perspective or related to one's existence. In addition, the

development of a personal philosophy on life can provide unique insight into problems and

dilemmas that might not otherwise be available.

The second factor of King (2008) is the personal meaning production. It is defined as the

ability to construct personal meaning and purpose in all physical and mental experiences,

including the capacity to create and master a life purpose. It is proposed that when faced with

stress, personal meaning production acts as a coping method by allowing an individual to

construct meaning and purpose within the stressful situation, thereby transforming the stressor

and reducing its negative impact. Similarly, when faced with a dilemma, personal meaning


production can lead to a meaning-based solution (i.e., a solution that considers the meaning and

purpose of the dilemma) and therefore act as a method of problem-solving as well.

The third factor that was proposed by King (2008) is the transcendental awareness. He

defined it as the capacity of a person to identify transcendent dimensions of himself (e.g., a

transpersonal or transcendent self), of others, and of the physical world (e.g., non-materialism,

holism) during the normal, waking state of consciousness, accompanied by the capacity to

identify their relationship to one's self and to the physical. Many may dismiss the appropriateness

of the word transcendence. Transcendence that was being determined in this factor is an

awareness of that which is beyond the physical or material. It is an awareness of that is

transcendent, not the self. Based on the model, this refers to any aspect of reality that is beyond

the physical. In terms of transcendent aspects of individuals, it should be clear that the concept of

the transcendent or transpersonal self serves as the best example. More recently, Lukey and

Baruss (2005) found that transcendent beliefs are associated with greater intelligence, further

suggesting a potential intellectual component underlying transcendence.

The final and last component of King’s Model of Spiritual Intelligence (2008) is the

conscious state expansion. According to King (2008), it is the ability to enter and exit higher

spiritual states of consciousness (e.g. pure consciousness, cosmic consciousness, unity, oneness)

at one's own discretion (as in deep contemplation, meditation, prayer, etc.). It involves some sort

of voluntary cognitive process and leads to the experience of a higher state. As such, the afore-

mentioned research findings lend evidence to highly adaptive applications of this capacity.

Although the exact "how" and "why" will have to remain unanswered, this ability appears to lead

to stress reduction.


All in all, this model of King’s (2008) implied that spiritual intelligence validates a

universal characteristic of the human psyche which has long been dismissed by science as

nothing more than irrational nonsense founded on a fear of the unknown. His model suggests that

the spiritual condition of humankind is not entirely irrational—that underlying human spirituality

and even some aspects of religiosity exists as a set of adaptive, cognitive capacities unique from

other manifestations of human intelligence, and that these capacities constitute a spiritual

intelligence. In line with his model, he also made an instrument measuring spiritual intelligence

named as The Spiritual Intelligence Self-Report Inventory (SISRI-24), which will also be used in

this study for measuring the spiritual intelligence of the participants in this study.

As a sort of intelligence, spirituality extends the psychologist’s conception of spirituality

and allows its association with rational cognitive processes like goal achievement and problem

resolution. The spiritual intelligence provides a general basis for the individual to be able to

consider his seeking for goals and meaning in life, and to move in the direction of the aims

which are personally meaningful. It aids the individual in directing his/her concerns to the wider

image and in focusing, consciously, his/her activities in a context that is wider ( Hosseini, Elias,

Krauss & Aishah, 2010).

Decision-Making Styles

Decision-making styles are theorized to be stable, trait-like patterns of approach to

situations that call for a decision. Like personality traits, these styles do not have perfect

predictive power, but instead represent likelihoods of behavior across situations and domains

(Leykin & DeRubeis, 2010). Decision-making styles are not absolute. Like in, Scott and Bruce

(1995) who suggested that there are five decision styles in decision-making, whereas Harren

(1978) and Nygren (2000) identified three decision styles. Decision styles were found to be


associated with a variety of behaviors and attitudes, including life choices, such as career and

health-related decisions (Crossley & Highhouse, 2005; Galotti, 2007; Galotti, Ciner,), consumer

behavior (Mitchell & Walsh, 2004), evaluations of new technology (Selart, Johansen,

Holmesland, & Gron- haug, 2008), and cultural backgrounds (Mann, 1998). In this study, the

decision-making styles that is proposed by Scott and Bruce (1995) will be used to measure the

decisions made by college students.

Scott and Bruce (1995) proposed five decision-making models. The first decision-making

style is the rational decision-making style or thorough search for and logical evaluation of

alternatives. It has been found to correlate positively with internal locus of control like, when the

individual attributes the control over his own destiny to factors within himself (Scott & Bruce,

1995). The second decision-making style is intuitive or the reliance on hunches and feelings.

Next is dependent decision-making style or the reliance on research for advice and direction

from others. The fourth decision-making style is the avoidant decision-making style or the

attempt to avoid decision-making. Last is the spontaneous decision-making style or the sense of

immediacy and desire to get through the decision-making process as soon as possible.

Studies also found that affect, stress, and other “non-rational” internal events are capable

of influencing people’s decisions (Bolte, Goschke, & Kuhl, 2003; Peters, Västfjäll, Gärling, &

Slovic, 2006), even individual differences and personality (Appelt et al., 2012).Most importantly,

studies of emotional intelligence and decision-making states that EI, and intelligence variable,

significantly predicts decision-making styles (Rehman, 2011 &Atwood, 2012).

Current Study

Basing on the Model of Spiritual Intelligence proposed by King in 2008, which states that

spiritual intelligence is in fact an intelligence construct as it meets the qualifications of


intelligence. I will now test its assumptions, which no other study to date and to my knowledge

has not yet done basing from all the literature and researches that I have gathered, that spiritual

intelligence like any other forms of intelligence both involves and contributes to abstract-

reasoning, aiding in decision-making, judgments, appraisals, and planning. Basing on that

assumption, I want to know if spiritual intelligence has a relationship with decision-making

styles of individuals, pertaining to senior college students per se.

Another theory that can support my research question is the conflict theory of decision

making by Janis and Mann in 1977 which attempts to characterize the decision-maker in regard

to: (a) confidence in the decision, (b) the coping strategies used to handle the internal conflict of

a decision and to arrive at the most adaptive solution. It also states that an individual’s most

prominent decision-making style is one that reflects the default coping strategy employed when

making important decisions, in which coping strategies or even affect are found to be an outcome

or a related variable to spiritual intelligence (King, 2008).

Basing on the past studies that noted that decision-making styles are also related to life

choices, such as career and health-related decisions (Crossley & Highhouse, 2005; Galotti, 2007;

Galotti, Ciner, Altenbaumer, Geerts, Rupp, & Woulfe, 2006), also make way to my research

question as these variables are also found to be related to spiritual intelligence such as quality of

life and life satisfaction (Anema, 2006; Luecken, & Gunn, 2005), active coping styles (Baider et

al., 1999; Holland et al., 1999), goal seeking and goal attainment (Halama, 2003, as cited in

Halama & Strizenec, 2004).

The four factors of King’s Model of Spiritual Intelligence are also related to decision

making as it was assumed on the theory that (1) there is no limit to such application, as any

problem can be approached from an existential perspective or related to one's existence. In


addition, the development of a personal philosophy on life can provide unique insight into

problems and dilemmas that might not otherwise be available. (2) proposed that when faced with

stress, personal meaning production acts as a coping method by allowing an individual to

construct meaning and purpose within the stressful situation, thereby transforming the stressor

and reducing its negative impact. Similarly, when faced with a dilemma, personal meaning

production can lead to a meaning-based solution (i.e., a solution that considers the meaning and

purpose of the dilemma) and therefore act as a method of problem-solving as well. (3)

transcendent beliefs are associated with greater intelligence, further suggesting a potential

intellectual component underlying transcendence. (4) involves some sort of voluntary cognitive

process and leads to the experience of a higher state. With this, decision-making as a form of

solving the problem, either big or small, somehow states that it is related to spiritual intelligence.

The current study will focus on the relationship between spiritual intelligence and

decision-making styles. This will benefit the body of knowledge as this will be the first to test

King’s statements in his Model of Spiritual Intelligence. Spiritual intelligence extends the

psychologist’s conception of spirituality and allows its association with rational cognitive

processes like goal achievement, problem resolution and decision-making. The spiritual

intelligence provides a general basis for the individual to be able to consider his seeking for goals

and meaning in life, and to move in the direction of the aims which are personally meaningful. It

aids the individual in directing his/her concerns and decisions to the wider image and in

focusing, consciously, his/her activities in a context that is wider.

Research Questions

1. Does spiritual intelligence related to decision-making styles?


2. Do each of the four components of spiritual intelligence related to each decision-making

styles?

Hypotheses

1. Spiritual intelligence is related to decision-making styles.

2. Each of the four components of spiritual intelligence is significantly related to each of the

five decision-making styles.

Conceptual Framework

The figure below shows that college students’ spiritual intelligence is related to their decision-

making styles.

Figure 1

The relationship of spiritual intelligence to decision-making styles.

Method

Research Design

Spiritual Intelligence

Critical Existential Thinking Personal Meaning Production Transcendental Awareness Conscious State Expansion

Decision-Making Styles

Rational Decision Making Style Intuitive Decision Making Style Dependent Decision Making

Style Avoidant Decision Making Style Spontaneous Decision Making

Style


This study is a descriptive non-experimental quantitative research which entails providing

a description of the variables namely; spiritual intelligence and decision-making styles. I intend

to measure the variables without making any predictions on inferences regarding the possible

causes of information. The goal of this cross-sectional research is to verify the hypotheses that

spiritual intelligence is significantly related to decision-making styles, and that each of the four

components of spiritual intelligence is significantly related to each of the three decision-making

styles.

Participants

The study sample will contain 250 senior college students (4th year collge students)

enrolled in universities or colleges in Bulacan. The participating students will be selected using

a cluster sampling procedure based on their college level (4th year college students) as the

sampling unit. The study will examine at least three 4th year college class from different

universities or colleges in Bulacan. Male and female participants aged 18 and up will be included

in this study.

Instruments

Demographic Information. The participants will report basic demographic data: name

(optional), address, age, gender, and occupation.

Spiritual Intelligence. Spiritual Intelligence Self-Report Inventory (SISRI-24). The

SISRI-24 is a 24-item scale that consists of statements about behaviors, experiences, and ways of

being that represent four aspects of spiritual intelligence: Critical Existential Thinking, Personal

Meaning Production, Transcendental Awareness, and Conscious State Expansion. Participants

are asked to identify how much each statement is true for them on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging


from 0 (not at all true of me) to 4 (completely true of me). There are 7 items on the Critical

Existential Thinking subscale, allowing for a score between 0 and 28. Items include “I have

developed my own theories about such things as life, death, reality, and existence” and “I have

spent time contemplating the purpose or reason for my existence.” Five items make up the

Personal Meaning Production subscale, and the range for scores is between 0 and 20. Items

include “I am able to define a purpose or reason for life” and “I am able to make decisions

according to my purpose in life.” Seven items comprise the Transcendental Awareness Subscale,

allowing a range of scores from 0-28. Items include “I am aware of a deeper connection between

myself and other people” and “Recognizing the nonmaterial aspects of life helps me feel

centered.” The 5 items from the Conscious State Expansion subscale allow for scores between 0

and 20, and include “I am able to enter higher states of consciousness or awareness” and “I have

developed my own techniques for entering higher states of consciousness or awareness.” Only

item 6, which loads on the Transcendental Awareness subscale, is reverse coded. The inventory

allows participants to obtain an overall spiritual intelligence score, with a range between 0 and

96, calculated by summing all subscales, as well as scores for each subscale. Higher scores

correspond with higher reported spiritual intelligence. This was also used by Benedict-

Montgomery (2013) in her dissertation.

Decision-Making Styles. General Decision Making Style Questionnaire (GDMSQ). The

scale was developed by Scott and Bruce (1995). It contained 25 items which were characterized

as Rational Decision Making Style, Intuitive Decision Making Style, Dependent Decision

Making Style, Avoidant Decision Making Style, and Spontaneous Decision Making Style (5

items in each subscale). High score on each subscale indicated greater use of respective decision

making style and low score reflected less use of that decision making style. Furthermore internal


consistency and factor stability were found adequate (Scott & Bruce, 1995). GDMSQ is a 5-point

Likert scale where score 1 is equal to Strongly Disagree and 5 is equal to Strongly Agree and the

score on each subscale ranged from 5 to 25. Sample items of scale include “I often need help of

other people while making decisions”, “I rarely make decisions without taking opinions from

others”. All items showed significant positive correlation with their respective subscales ranging

from .54 to .78, (p < .05) which reflected construct validity of the scale (Hayee & Hassan, 2011).

Procedure

I will first coordinate to the universities or colleges to ask for permission in conducting

this study with their students. Once they agreed, the study will take place.

First, participants will be given an informed consent to sign, which indicates that they

will be participating in the study. This informed consent specifies the purpose of the study, the

types of research instruments which they will be answering, and the information that they are

free to remove themselves from participating in the study anytime that they want to, especially

when they feel that further participation in the study makes him or her uncomfortable.

After this, the set of questionnaires that will be used in this study will be disseminated to

the participants. They will be given 45 minutes to complete the questionnaires and will be asked

to answer it with full honesty and should leave no blank so that their data will not be considered

as void.

Data Analysis

The data will be performed through Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

To measure and interpret the strength of the relationship between the four components of

spiritual intelligence and the three decision-making styles, I will use Pearson’s r correlation


coefficient. To evaluate how spiritual intelligence predicts decision-making styles, multiple

regression will be used.

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