Show Me the Money: Diverging Effects of Zooming in to Versus Zooming out of Money on Attitudes and Moral Behavior
Year: 2013
Type: preprint
Abstract: Does money lead to greedy, selfish, antisocial behavior or to fair, cooperative, pro-social behavior? This article shows evidence for both, suggesting that people have both sets of automatic associations, which can be differentially activated by zooming in to or out of money pictures. In economic games, participants who had previously zoomed in to money tended toward selfish, greedy behaviors — unlike those who had zoomed out of money, which led to fair and cooperative behaviors. These patterns were found with ultimatum games and prisoner’s dilemmas in a field experiment at a professional services firm (Experiment 1) and in a laboratory study (Experiment 2). Implicit measures indicated that zooming in to money increased positive affective and cognitive attitudes toward money, whereas zooming out of money had the opposite effects. Thus, people apparently have two contradictory sets of automatic associations (including behavioral tendencies) to money, which is a ubiquitous feature of social life and business organizations, in particular.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Tom van Laer
Institution: The University of Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3035193317