WASHINGTON — Merely the sight of money can change a person's behaviour, says a study done by an American marketing professor and financed by Canadian research institutions.
Kathleen Vohs, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues conducted a series of nine experiments in which people were asked to do puzzles or other tasks. The behaviour of people exposed to money was compared to others who were not prompted to think about it.
The two groups acted differently, the researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Dr. Vohs' research was financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chair Council.
“The mere presence of money changes people,” Dr. Vohs said. “The effect can be negative, it can be positive. Exposure to money, or the concept of money, elevates a sense of self-sufficiency” and can make people less social, she said.
In one of the experiments, 52 University of Minnesota students were divided into groups and asked to make sentences out of a scrambled group of words. For one group the sentence turned out to be “a high-paying salary” while others got “it is cold outside.”
Then they were asked to arrange a set of discs into a square and told they could ask for help if they needed it. Some who had made sentences not mentioning money were placed so they could see a stack of Monopoly money.
The students who had unscrambled the sentence about money worked on the puzzle an average of 5.2 minutes before asking for help. Those who had made the neutral sentence but could see the play money worked on it an average of 5.1 minutes.
But students who had no money-related prompt turned to others for help sooner: they worked just over three minutes before asking for help.
In another experiment 44 students at Florida State University were each given eight 25-cent coins, which they were told were left over from a previous experiment. They were asked to unscramble sentences that divided the subjects into two groups, one that was reminded of money by the sentence and others that were not.
As the students left, the researcher mentioned that a box was beside the door for donations for needy students if the subjects wanted to chip in, but they didn't have to.
On average, students who had read neutral sentences donated $1.34 while those whose sentences reminded them of money kept more for themselves, giving an average of just 77 cents.
In another test, 61 students at the University of British Columbia sat at desks to complete questionnaires. Some desks faced a poster showing money, some saw a poster of flowers and others saw a seascape.
They were then asked to choose between group or individual recreational activities, such as a dinner for four or individual cooking lessons. Those who had seen the money poster were more likely to pick individual activities than those looking at the other posters.
The experiments indicate that even quite trivial exposure to money changes peoples' goals and behaviour, Carole Burgoyne and Stephen Lee of the University of Exeter in England said in a commentary on the paper.
“Subjects exposed to the idea of money subsequently show more self-reliant but also a more self-centred approach to problem solving than subjects exposed to neutral concepts,” said Lee and Burgoyne, who were not part of Dr. Vohs research team.
That can have a direct approach on how people live their lives, said Dr. Vohs.
For example, she said, a student with little money who wants to move to a new apartment gets a group of friends together, and they have a few laughs along the way.
Once they get a good job, however, they hire a mover. That probably is more efficient, but the moving individual loses out on some personal moments, Dr. Vohs explained in a telephone interview.
“The underlying idea is that at some point early on in human evolution, everyone probably needed someone else to help them achieve their goals,” whether building a home or catching food. Eventually systems of exchange came along, and then money, which could be exchanged for things, allowing people to pursue their own aims without the aid of others. So, over time, people with money did not need other people so much.
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