The psychology of money

Time is not money Thinking about it makes you a better person,
not a worse one Oct 5th 2013 “THE love of money”, St Paul memorably wrote to
his protégé Timothy, “is the root of all evil.” “All”
may be putting it a bit strongly, but dozens of
psychological studies have indeed shown that
people primed to think about money before an
experiment are more likely to lie, cheat and steal during the course of that experiment. Another well-known aphorism, ascribed to
Benjamin Franklin, is “time is money”. If true, that
suggests a syllogism: that the love of time is a
root of evil, too. But a paper just published in Psychological Science by Francesca Gino of Harvard and Cassie Mogilner of the University of
Pennsylvania suggests precisely the opposite. Advertisement Dr Gino and Dr Mogilner asked a group of
volunteers to do a series of what appeared to be
aptitude tests. As is often the case in such
experiments, though, what the volunteers were
told, and what the truth was, were rather different
things. In the first test they were asked to make, within
three minutes, as many coherent sentences as
they could out of a set of words they had been
presented with. What they were not told was that
each of them had been assigned to one of three
groups. Some volunteers’ word sets were seeded with ones associated with money, such as
“dollars”, “financing” and “spend”. Some were
seeded with words associated with time (eg,
“clock”, “hours”, “moment”). And some were
seeded with neither. Thus unknowingly primed, the
volunteers were ready for the second test. This was mathematical. They were given a sheet
of paper with 20 matrices which each contained 12
numbers, two of which added up to ten (for
example, 3.81 and 6.19). They had to write down,
on a separate answer sheet, how many of these
pairs they could manage to find in five minutes. They were also given a packet of money and told
they could reward themselves with a dollar for
each pair they discovered. Crucially, they were not asked to show their
workings on the answer sheets—and the matrix
sheets, on which those workings might have
appeared, carried no identifier and were
ostentatiously discarded once the test was done.
Nevertheless, by hiding an identification code in a sample matrix on the answer sheet, Dr Gino and
Dr Mogilner knew which matrix sheet each
candidate had been given and thus who had
cheated and who had not. They found that 88% of
those who had been primed with money-related
words in the first test cheated, as did 67% of those given neutral words. Of those primed with time-
related words, though, only 42% cheated. Nor, despite St Paul’s aphorism, was the lure of
lucre during the experiment (as opposed to the
effect of thinking about it as a result of being
primed) necessary as a corrupting influence. A
similar trial on different participants showed that
presenting the matrix as a test of intelligence also caused those primed with the idea of money to
cheat more than those primed with the idea of time
—though, intriguingly, that did not apply if the
matrix was presented as a test of personality. This led Dr Gino and Dr Mogilner to suspect that
self-reflection played a part in controlling unethical
behaviour during the test. They therefore
conducted a third test in which, for half the
volunteers, there was a mirror in the cubicle they
were sitting in when doing the experiment. Volunteers primed to think about money cheated
39% of the time when a mirror was present but
67% when it was not. Those primed to think about
time cheated 32% of the time in the presence of
the mirror and 36% in its absence—results that are
statistically indistinguishable. Finally, a fourth experiment asked primed
volunteers to fill in a questionnaire before tackling
the matrix. In among “filler” questions intended to
disguise what was happening this asked them to
rate how they felt about self-reflective statements
like, “Right now, I am thinking about who I am as a person.” As in the previous tests, those primed with money
words cheated more often than those primed with
neutral words and far more often than those primed
with time words. But whether someone cheated
was also related to how strongly he felt about the
self-reflective statements presented to him in the questionnaire. It seems, then, that thinking about time has the
opposite effect on people from thinking about
money. It makes them more honest than normal,
rather than less so. Moreover, the more reflective
they are, the more honest they become. There
must be an aphorism in