Money Priming Can Change People’s Thoughts, Feelings, Motivations, and Behaviors: An Update on 10 Years of Experiments

Money Priming Can Change People’s Thoughts, Feelings, Motivations, and Behaviors: An Update on 10 Years of Experiments Kathleen D. Vohs

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Money Priming Can Change People’s Thoughts, Feelings, Motivations, and Behaviors: An Update on 10 Years of Experiments 2013 10.1037/xge0000091 money2013-money-priming-can-change-people-s money2013-money-priming-can-change-people-s.txt, the project's staged copy 5c6f1c024bfb462c46c8e08da5040c11c151c2e6 personal-copy social-psychology

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0 spans located by searching the stored text for the quote's exact words, allowing any whitespace between them mechanism Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. money priming Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. review review Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms Priming works by supplying an interpretation for an ambiguous outcome situation, so the more constrained and unambiguous the outcome, the less room the prime has to shift the response and the smaller the effect Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms Frequent real-world contact with money keeps the concept chronically accessible, so that even subtle cues suffice to activate it and change behaviour Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms Money cues set two opposing forces in motion - one routing from money to free markets to endorsement of the systems supporting them, the other routing from money to personal agency and self-sufficiency, which removes the need to endorse those systems - and the two cancel Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms Money primes act by activating the phenomenological self as an owner of money, which is why primes tying money to the participant personally produce parallel and stronger effects Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The review is explicitly partial: it does not cover the full body of money-priming experiments. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The author's own proposed mediator (independence/interdependence) was only weakly supported. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The originally hypothesised mechanism, feelings of power, was not supported by the authors' own measurements. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the paper claims the subject of money has been left to economists and argues that the psychological side of it explains events economics could not Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. money priming money priming Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. ambiguity ambiguity Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. priming effect priming effect Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. accessibility accessibility Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. system justification system justification Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. A THEORY OF WHEN PRIMING WORKS AT ALL, OFFERED IN REPLY TO A FAILED REPLICATION. `Variations in a prime's meaning, the ease with which primed content comes to mind, the prime's motivational importance, and the ambiguity of the outcome situation influence the impact of the prime.` Four moderators, stated in the abstract of a paper whose third sentence is that Rohrer, Pashler and Harris failed to replicate. The provenance matters as much as the content: these are conditions named AFTER a null, which is the weakest position from which to name them and also the position in which the field most needs them named Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AMBIGUITY OF THE OUTCOME IS OFFERED AS THE REASON COGNITIVE PRIMING EFFECTS ARE SMALLER THAN SOCIAL ONES, WHICH INVERTS THE USUAL READING. `Quotation withheld.` The usual account of that same effect-size gap is that social priming effects are inflated. This says they are large because the outcome is loose - a property of the MEASURE, not of the phenomenon - and it makes the gap a prediction rather than an embarrassment. Both readings fit the same numbers, and this corpus holds papers from both sides of the gap Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND IT IS FALSIFIABLE, WITH THE TEST SUPPLIED: `Quotation withheld.` The same outcome task was given two NAMES - Kay et al. (2004) called it either a bland `situation` or a `community game` - and `business priming led to more competitive behaviors than neutral primes when the task was blandly called a situation, there was no effect of prime condition when the task was called the community game`. Ambiguity manipulated by renaming, with a null in the constrained arm. That is a much stronger form of the claim than a post-hoc moderator, and it is the paper's best evidence Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE PAPER'S OWN SUMMARY OF 165 EXPERIMENTS IS TWO EFFECTS, BOTH STATED AS DIRECTIONS RATHER THAN SIZES: people reminded of money `are less interpersonally attuned. They are not prosocial, caring, or warm. They eschew interdependence.` And they `shift into professional, business, and work mentality. Quotation withheld` A count that large (`165 to date, from 18 countries`) with no pooled effect size is itself a fact about the literature - the defence is breadth of replication rather than magnitude Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Caruso, Vohs, Baxter, and Waytz (2013) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. contradicts → Rohrer, Pashler, and Harris (2015) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. ambiguity —causes→ priming effect ambiguity priming effect direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.85 · note: THE DIRECTION IS STATED AS ITS CONTRAPOSITIVE - less room, smaller effect - and the axis quote carries it that way rather than being paraphrased into the positive form. Weight 0.85: the first clause is cited to Higgins & Brendl and Loersch & Payne rather than demonstrated here, and this paper's own status is a reply to a null. The Kay et al. manipulation is the evidence, and it is in the senses. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but attributed: the span cites Higgins & Brendl and Loersch & Payne for ambiguity determining priming effects. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. effect size (Cohen's d) effect size (Cohen's d) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. sample size sample size about this quote: THE QUOTE STOPS WHERE THE EXTRACTED TEXT IS INTERRUPTED: after its last word the text runs into the publisher's copyright line - the quote's last word, 'This', is that line's first word ('This document is copyrighted…'), so the words that completed the sentence are not continuous with it and are not quoted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The 165 money-priming experiments from 18 countries point to at least two major effects. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. People reminded of money are less interpersonally attuned than after neutral primes. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. People reminded of money work harder on difficult tasks, perform better on objective outcomes, and report feeling efficacious. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Feelings of power were tested repeatedly as the explanation for money-priming effects and were not supported: money primes did not change measured power. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The independence-interdependence self-construal account fared only marginally better: scores moved in the predicted direction but only weakly. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. People reminded of new money make more moral decisions and seek fairness, compared with used money or neutral primes. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Cash cues heighten sensitivity to costs: more attention to price and less desire to spend. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. College students, working adults, managers and children as young as 4 show similar effects. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Different delivery methods for the money prime - images, physical handling, even play money - yield comparable effects. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Withdrawing cash from a machine reduced helpfulness more than walking past a cash dispenser. WHOSE RESULT THIS IS: studies in France showed - THE SUBJECT OF THIS RESULT IS AN INDEFINITE STUDY, NOT THIS PAPER. 'Previous studies reported', 'studies in guinea pig showed', 'recent studies have reported' - somebody else's work under a common noun rather than a name, with a citation in the sentence and no first-person marker. The quote is verbatim and the claim is true; only the attribution is wrong. FOUND BY MEASURING MY OWN CUE'S RECALL: the first sweep required a NAMED author as the subject ('Sperling (1960) demonstrated') and found 17. Reading eleven citation-bearing findings on 'Plakke2016' by hand showed four the cue could not see - 'A study examining recognition found', 'studies of typical human subjects have demonstrated', 'A follow up study found' - so the named cue's 17 was a floor and not a count. A CUE'S FALSE POSITIVES TELL YOU NOTHING ABOUT ITS FALSE NEGATIVES, and the only way to find these was to read a record's whole layer. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The proposed reason the Caruso et al. system-justification result failed to replicate is that money priming induces self-sufficiency, which works against the defensive motive that normally drives system justification. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. exchange mentality exchange mentality Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. low control low control Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. independence independence Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. interdependence interdependence Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. feelings of power feelings of power Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. ambiguity of the outcome situation ambiguity of the outcome situation Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. accessibility accessibility Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. motivational relevance motivational relevance Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 165 — total number of money-priming experiments counted to date, run in 18 countries Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 200% — increase in intended donations produced by a credit card prime relative to no prime Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 113% — increase in bids in a real binding auction for a credit card prime versus a cash prime Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution.

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