The mere idea of money

"Money isn’t everything" – people always say that but now science throws in its coin to say that money is certainly not one that fosters cooperation or helpfulness according to a recent study entitled The Psychological Consequences of Money, published in the Nov. 17 journal Science. The study, done by Kathleen Vohs, Nicole Mead and Miranda Goode, is not even about the prospect of monetary reward or the feeling of wealth as attached to property – but just the mere reminder of money. This reveals a mouthful about the effect of the idea of money on our behavior – that before we even realize the supposed rewards that could be brought in by the tool that is "money," we already behave to protect our own interests and also expect others to protect their own.

Nine tests within the study have shown that those primed with reminders of money such as Monopoly money, floating money on the computer screen, or a set of jumbled phrases, behaved more "self-sufficiently." "Self-sufficient" here is an operative term to mean that the "money group" insisted for significantly longer times to be by themselves and took a lot longer to help others as well.

In the first test, subjects were asked to do some descrambling task. One group had participants descrambling phrases that had to do with money – for example, "high-paying salary." Another group just rearranged neutral phrases, i.e., words that did not connote "money," while the third group also worked on the same neutral phrases with a reminder of some stack of Monopoly money in their periphery. Then all the groups were asked to do a difficult task that involved reassembling disks. The two groups that were primed with money (money phrases and Monopoly money) took a longer time working out the puzzle for themselves and to ask for help.

In the second test, one group was made to read something that would activate the idea of "abundance of money while growing up" and one that had to do with the opposite. Then they were again asked to do an unrelated unsolvable puzzle (the subjects were not aware the puzzle was unsolvable). The first group I mentioned again took a significantly longer time to ask for help.

The third test involved the number of participants who were willing to help the experimenter code the data sheets. The "money group" was a lot less willing to help with this task (subjects did not know it was what was being measured.) The fourth test revealed that even the time that it took helping out peer is much less when performed by one from the "money group." In the fifth test, the experimenters dropped a container of pencils while the subjects were doing an unrelated task and it turned out that that money group helped gather much fewer pencils than the control group. The sixth test involved "donations" with the participants having been given $2 in exchange for their participation and then confronted later on by a donation box for an unrelated student fund. The money group donated much less than the control group. For the seventh, eight and ninth experiments, they all involved the choice to work or be alone as indicated by the "distance between the chairs" that the participants arranged, the number of solitary activities they chose and the proportion of participants who chose to work by themselves. These last three tests all had the money group choosing more distance between the chairs, more solitary activities and more of them choosing to work by themselves.

All the nine tests showed that, indeed, even just the idea of money makes us more individualistic, caring more about ourselves and expecting others to take care of themselves as well. The mere idea of money makes us less cooperative and helpful. The participants in the study were raised in Canada, the US, China and Hong Kong. In the same Science-published article, they even cited another study that found economic students made more "self-interested" moves in social dilemma games than any other student in other disciplines.

On TV, we are bombarded with reminders of money in the form of visuals and soundbytes for cash prizes from commercials. This is the trail we mentally trek before we are faced with more profound expositions of the human experience such as recent Bicol natural disaster. Knowing how humans turn "selfish" after having been primed with even just the idea of money, maybe those responsible should be more mindful as to how and when and where they present their call for help to be more effective.

That is why I think the Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus did not win the 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics but the Nobel Peace Prize. They are a cut above what is so ordinary and predictable about human nature when economics is involved. The Nobel organization gave them the award "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights." They gave credit to people based on trust and this fostered cooperation, not selfishness and a "take the money and run attitude" which made the Grameen experience work. The award is a statement that even the most celebrated cases of entrepreneurship and success in the creation of wealth could be seen as pedestrian in relation to what the Grameen Bank and Yunus have proven to the world when they turned the concept of banking on its head, operating on their conviction that "poverty in the world is an artificial creation. It does not belong to human civilization." Yunus and the Grameen Bank foiled the traditional and institutionalized mechanisms of money and profit and showed the world what real wealth is, beyond the mere idea of money. They showed us that while economics could make us rich, you have to be more than a mere puppet of the mere idea of money to become human.

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