Reminders of money make us more likely to work and play alone, and less likely to offer help to others.
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SYDNEY: Money makes us more likely to work and play alone and less likely to offer help to others, U.S. researchers say.
"Money has been said to change people's motivation, mainly for the better, and their behaviour toward others, mainly for the worse," said lead author Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota. "[This] pattern helps explain why people view money as both the greatest good and evil."
The research, which is published in the U.S. journal Science, used a set of nine experiments to examine the psychological effects of exposure to money.
People who were reminded of money - by an essay about money, a screensaver showing images of cold hard cash, or a stack of Monopoly notes in their peripheral vision - were consistently less likely to ask for help and to give it, and were more likely to work and play alone.
In one of the tasks, reminders of money made people less likely to ask for help when solving a problem. They were also less likely to offer help to others - those who hadn't been reminded of money gave a saintly 42 minutes of their time to a good cause, while people under the spell of cash helped out for a miserly 25 minutes.
In another task, all participants were given two dollars but only half were exposed to a number of phrases involving money. The group who had been verbally primed to think about lucre subsequently donated less cash to a charitable cause.
Reminding people of money also increased their desire for personal space. This was measured by asking subjects to place two chairs together in anticipation of meeting someone. People reminded of money consistently left the chairs further apart than those who were free from the clutches of cash.
According to the authors, the common theme emerging from these experiments is that "money evokes a view that everyone fends for him or herself." The influence of money leads not only to self-interested behaviour, but the expectation that others will also act this way.
Vohs and her colleagues are part of a small but growing band of researchers who are trying to understand the role of money in society. Dr Stephen Lea of the University of Exeter in England, who has likened money to both a tool and a drug, says what these researchers have in common is "perplexity … that so massive a social fact as money gets so little attention".
"People don't behave 100 per cent sensibly around money … Money does weird things to our relationships to tasks and to other people," said Lea. "Put simply, it is too strong a motivator - idiotically small amounts of money will motivate us to do things we wouldn't do for much stronger 'real' motives."
Lea also points out "our catastrophic inability to make rational choices between money now and money later; the savings and debt behaviour of the average citizen is so far from optimal it isn't even funny."
Vohs believes that our attitudes to money have largely shaped the way we live: "As countries and cultures developed ... money enhanced individualism but diminished communal motivations."
