Numerous studies have shown that being prompted to think about money can predispose people to engage in self-sufficient thinking and behavior—but some findings suggest that demographic characteristics may moderate this type of effect. In a new research article, scientists present results from three experiments that systematically explore these money-priming effects, finding inconsistent evidence for the effect of money primes on various measures of self-sufficient thinking and behavior.
The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Psychology researcher Eugene M. Caruso (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) and co-authors Oren Shapira (Stony Brook University) and Justin Landy (also Chicago Booth) were motivated to carry out this systematic exploration after conducting a set of studies in which they observed varied findings that were inconsistent with their predictions.
In their initial studies, Caruso and his collaborators found that the effects of money reminders on participants' thinking often seemed to depend on certain demographic characteristics, a result they were not expecting. In discussing these results, they discovered that colleagues had also observed unpredicted interaction effects in their research in this area.
Importantly, the kinds of interaction effects observed seemed to vary across different studies that used different techniques for activating the concept of money.
"These inconsistent results led us to step back to try to gain a better understanding of whether different money primes lead to similar effects, and whether they interact with sociodemographic characteristics in a reliable, and potentially theoretically meaningful, manner," Caruso explains.
To do this, Caruso, Shapira, and Landy decided to systematically evaluate the effects of various money-priming manipulations on a predetermined set of outcomes while accounting for the potential influence of certain sociodemographic factors, within a single experiment that sampled a diverse group of participants.
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