Mere Thought of Money Makes People Selfish

Screensaver of floating money used in some of the experiments.

Just the mere thought of money can turn a person selfish, so that he helps others less often and prefers to play alone, a new study shows.

In a series of nine experiments, researchers found that money enhanced people's motivation to achieve their own goals and degraded their behavior toward others. The concept of money, they suggest, makes a person feel more self-sufficient and thus more apt to stand alone.

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The scientists split 50 undergraduate students into two groups. One was primed with the concept of money; other served as a control and was not primed. A few methods were used to get the participants thinking about money: In some experiments, a stack of play Monopoly money was within a subject's peripheral view, or a subject would unscramble word phrases dealing with money, while in others a participant would sit in front of a computer screensaver showing pictures of floating money [image].

In one test, a participant sat in a lab filling out a questionnaire when a supposed student walked into the room and said, "Can you come over here and help me?" She explained that she was an undergraduate student and needed help coding data sheets, each of which would take five minutes. Some of the participants didn't help at all, Vohs said. The control group volunteered an average of 42.5 minutes of their time, whereas the money group gave about 25 minutes.

To understand how money affects interpersonal relationships, the scientists told each participant they would have a conversation to acquaint themselves with another participant. While the experimenter went to retrieve the other subject, the participant was to set up two chairs for the engagement. The subjects in the money group put more physical distance between themselves and new acquaintances compared with control subjects.

Jeanna Bryner is managing editor of Scientific American. Previously she was editor in chief of Live Science and, prior to that, an editor at Scholastic's Science World magazine. Bryner has an English degree from Salisbury University, a master's degree in biogeochemistry and environmental sciences from the University of Maryland and a graduate science journalism degree from New York University. She has worked as a biologist in Florida, where she monitored wetlands and did field surveys for endangered species, including the gorgeous Florida Scrub Jay. She also received an ocean sciences journalism fellowship from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is a firm believer that science is for everyone and that just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.