Merely Activating the Concept of Money Changes Personal and Interpersonal Behavior

Money plays a significant role in people’s lives, and yet little experimental attention has been given to the psychological underpinnings of money. We systematically varied whether and to what extent the concept of money was activated in participants’ minds using methods that minimized participants’ conscious awareness of the money cues. On the one hand, participants reminded of money were less helpful than were participants not reminded of money, and they also preferred solitary activities and less physical intimacy. On the other hand, reminders of money prompted participants to work harder on challenging tasks and led to desires to take on more work as compared to participants not reminded of money. In short, even subtle reminders of money elicit big changes in human behavior. KEYWORDS—money; self; competency; performance; helping; interpersonal relationships Money changes people. Although this statement seems to be a truism, little work has been done to test the psychological underpinnings of money. We examined the potential cognitive, motivational, emotional, and behavioral changes that result from the activation of the idea of money in people’s minds. We found that even subtle reminders of money produce robust changes in behavior. Money-related concepts have been studied in psychology, sociology, marketing, anthropology, and health sciences, and this research hints at money having dual effects. These studies have found that money is bad for the interpersonal self but can be good for the personal self (Vohs, Mead, & Goode, 2006). On the former point, research is clear that the love of money is often the start of trouble—relationship trouble, mostly. Americans who highly value money have poorer relationships than do those who take a more moderate approach to money (e.g., Kasser & Ryan, 1993). People’s mental health is also harmed when they value both family relationships and the possession of material objects, because these two values conflict and cause mental stress (Burroughs & Rindfleisch, 2002). (Intriguingly, people who value material objects but not family do not have mental health repercussions.) Hence, wanting money or what money can buy impairs relationship-related outcomes. However, life seems to be better when people have money than when people lack money. Evidence that has been widely discussed and debated (Diener & Seligman, 2004) suggests that having more money is associated with more frequent positive emotions and less frequent negative emotions than having less money is (although methodological factors may contribute to the effect; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2006). Other work shows that having money is good for personal health. Studies of socioeconomic status (of which income is a major determinant) consistently indicate that financial strain has negative effects on mortality (Adler & Snibbe, 2003). Financial strain is accompanied by heightened depression, ill physical health, and lower feelings of control (Price, Choi, & Vinokur, 2002). Recent work revealed that having money protects people from unfortunate and unforeseen perturbations in life, mainly because money allows for control over the outcomes (Johnson & Krueger, 2006). In short, having money confers benefits to people’s lives. We found it somewhat puzzling that wanting money seems to make life worse, but having money makes life better; after all, few (if any) other major wants or needs have this quality. So we developed a pair of hypotheses to reveal more about the psychological effects of money. Address correspondence to Kathleen D. Vohs, University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management, Department of Marketing, 3-150 321 19th Ave. So., Minneapolis, MN 55455; e-mail: [email protected]. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 208 Volume 17—Number 3 Copyright r 2008 Association for Psychological Science PREDICTING THE DUAL EFFECTS OF MONEY Common uses of money include procurement of goods and being rewarded for successful task completion (Lea & Webley, 2006). In some cases, people exchange resources in a manner that is sensitive to the contribution that each person makes to the exchange (i.e., ratio-based exchange, for which money is the quintessential, but not only, mechanism). That is, person A may have performed a task that yields an output that person B finds exceptionally valuable. In return for being allowed to own or use the output of that task, B may give A some money. When people trade resources on the basis of equity, the more that B values the output, the more money B should give A in a proportional sense. This type of exchange defines what is known as a market-pricing mode, one of the four fundamental ways of relating to others socially (Fiske, 1991). Market pricing underlies cost/benefit analyses, in that a person considers what he or she will receive in return before enacting a given behavior. Because money is the most typical form of market pricing, over time, the mere presence of money should elicit a market-pricing orientation toward the world. This framework led to two hypotheses. Our first hypothesis was that money is linked to a focus on personal inputs and outputs, which may manifest behaviorally as an emphasis on personal performance. This prediction came from the fact that people use money to procure goods and services to enable them to meet personal needs, which they can do far more efficiently with money than they could without it. A secondary source of support comes from the fact that money rewards successful task completion, which means that money often follows from performance efforts. Hence, we predicted that reminding people of the concept of money would encourage individual performance efforts. Although promoting personal performance may be beneficial for getting ahead, it may not be the best for getting along with others. If money conjures up a market-pricing mode, in which people think of life in transactional terms with inputs and expected outputs, then one might expect problems when it comes to socially relating to others. Indeed, the mode that underlies the connectedness found in warm and intimate relationships is located at the opposite end of the relational-model spectrum (Fiske, 1991), suggesting that behaviors elicited by one mode may clash with the other mode. Hence, our second hypothesis was that being reminded of money would make people less sensitive to the needs of others than they would be without that reminder. We used the term self-sufficiency to describe the inner state that accompanies a market pricing mode. Self-sufficiency is defined as an emphasis on behaviors of one’s own choosing accomplished without active involvement from others. Being in a self-sufficient state would mean being hesitant to allow others to involve the self in their activities (for more information on the term self-sufficiency, see Vohs et al., 2006). TESTING THE MIXED EFFECT OF MONEY Research on concepts related to money (e.g., materialism, desire for money, wealth, financial strain) yielded some important ideas about the possible effects of money, but it was unclear whether money was the sole driving force. There are many differences between wealthy and nonwealthy people and between people who value material goods and those who do not, and these differences may have been driving the effects in extant research. Therefore, we took our hypotheses to the laboratory and used experimental manipulations to change how strongly or weakly the concept of money was activated in participants’ minds. We randomly assigned participants to the different conditions, thereby eliminating concerns that different types of people could produce the effects. Together, these two features allowed us to make causal claims about whether money per se determines the observed effects. Additionally, we used subtle reminders, or primes, to uncover natural mental associations by minimizing the salience of the manipulations, such that participants were likely unaware of the presence of monetary cues. The methods we used can be categorized into four broad classes. In one manipulation, participants played the board game Monopoly, after which participants moved on to a new task. But before the new task began, we gave participants in the highmoney condition $4,000 of play money and gave participants in the low-money condition $200, which we simply said was ‘‘for later.’’ Participants in the control condition also played the game but afterwards were given no play money. A second manipulation asked participants to think about life with abundant or restricted finances. A third manipulation had participants organize phrases that were or were not related to money (‘‘I cashed a check’’ versus ‘‘I wrote the letter’’). A fourth manipulation involved participants sitting near images of cash or neutral images. All of these manipulations yielded similar effects. We first investigated the effects of money on social relationships by testing helpfulness toward others. We predicted that reminders of money would detract from helpfulness due to its suspected role in straining social relationships. Moreover, helpfulness is a socially valuable motive that we predicted would reflect changes in underlying preferences related to sociality. We measured helpfulness in four experiments that varied whether the helping opportunity involved offering time or offering money. In one experiment, participants were reminded of money via the Monopoly game method mentioned earlier. Later, the experimenter took the participant across the laboratory ostensibly to perform a task in another room, and at a certain moment when the participant walked by, a confederate (a woman who worked for the laboratory, unbeknownst to participants) also walked by and spilled 27 pencils in front of the participant. Participants who had been strongly reminded of money were less helpful than either set of participants who had been weakly reminded of money (i.e., the low-money and control groups) in that they picked up fewer pencils. In another experiment, participants Volume 17—Number 3 209 Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode