The Desire for Caloric Resources Increases the Desire for Financial Resources and Vice Versa

This report attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation for humans’ motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We propose that people’s desire for money is a modern derivate of their desire for food. In three studies, we show the reciprocal association between the incentive value of food and of money. In Study 1, hungry participants were less likely than satiated participants to donate to charity. In Study 2, participants in a room with an olfactory food cue, known to increase the desire to eat, offered less money in a give-some game compared with participants in a room free of scent. In Study 3, participants’ desire for money affected the amount of M&M’s they ate in a subsequent taste test, but only among participants who were not restricting their food intake in order to manage their weight. One of the strongest motivations for people living in modern societies is the desire to obtain money. The cultural dominance of money is striking: It has been adopted irresistibly by any human society that has encountered it (Lea & Webley, 2006). But despite the extraordinary power of money, for most of humankind’s history, ‘‘resources’’ have connoted food rather than money (Diamond, 1997). Collecting or producing enough food to survive has always been humans’ main challenge. It seems reasonable, then, to consider a biological basis for humans’ attraction to money. The canonical economic model assumes that the utility from money is indirect, and that money is valued only for the goods or services it can procure (e.g., Camerer, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2005). In psychological terminology, standard economics considers money a conditioned reinforcer. Whereas food is generally considered a primary reinforcer, money can be consumed only indirectly. As a consequence, standard economics views the desire for food and the desire to obtain money as two different strivings. The relation between the two reinforcers must be asymmetric: Money can buy food, but food cannot buy money. However, some neurological evidence suggests that the desires for money and food might be more entwined than most economists would predict. Breiter, Aharon, Kahneman, Dale, and Shizgal (2001) found that the orbitofrontal cortex is activated by monetary rewards, whereas O’Doherty, Deichmann, Critchley, and Dolan (2002) found the orbitofrontal cortex to be activated by the consumption and anticipation of sweet-tasting food rewards. The overlap in neural activation suggests a common pathway for processing money and food rewards, and such a common pathway would have major implications for the standard economic perspective on the utility of money. Some behavioral evidence is consistent with the proposal that financial and caloric resources are closely entwined. Nelson and Morrison (2005) found that men who feel either poor or hungry prefer heavier women than men who feel rich or satiated. The authors suggested that preference for women’s body weight is determined by the individual’s experience of resource scarcity. This idea is consistent with the finding that in cultures with scarce resources, heavier women are preferred to slim women (e.g., Pettijohn & Jungeberg, 2004; Symons, 1979). As both financial deprivation and caloric deprivation among men appear to be related to their ideal female body weight, we suggest that cues signaling scarcity in one domain might motivate people to acquire or maintain resources in the other domain. Thus, we claim that people are less likely to sacrifice money when they desire food than when they are satiated, and that people eat more when they desire money than when their desire for money is low. Three studies tested this hypothesis.