In Oliver Stone’s classic 1987 film Wall Street, a slick-haired Michael Douglas addresses a boardroom of investors as the iconic Gordon Gekko:
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for want of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.1
Gekko embodies that particular brand of 1980s morality that placed faith in the ultimate goodness of the free market. The individual’s pursuit of self-interest (read: the individual’s greed) would guarantee the welfare of the masses, save the day and so on. We (consumers) didn’t have to do much but spend, and the market would take care of the rest. Few of us believed the extreme version of this after 1987; fewer still after what Wikipedia dubs the ‘Financial Crisis of 2007–2010’.
Clearly the ‘greed is good’ claim doesn’t quite capture the complexity of things. But neither does the equally trite ‘greed is bad’. This simplistic view has it that the recent global economic downturn, and others like it, was a symptom of the unbridled greed of the marketplace. But things are never that simple. Market crashes have all manner of causes: political infighting, decision-making biases, the specifics of market regulation, the group psychology of shareholders . . . the list could go on. What’s more, money and our pursuit of it is a constant; if one wants to blame greed for financial bust, then one must be willing to praise it in equal measure for financial boom.
But this chapter is not about greed in the marketplace. It’s about greed in other aspects of our everyday life. And just as the role of greed in the market is a complex one, so it is in our everyday behaviour.
The word ‘greed’ derives from the Middle English ‘gredi’, a word closer in meaning to modern English’s ‘gluttony’ than ‘greed’. However, it is not the culinary that greed these days describes, but the monetary. Greed is a vice of money, and it is money that is at the heart of greed’s contemporary status as a sin (or at least a pretty bad thing). In perhaps the most famous painting of the seven deadly sins, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, greed is personified as a bribe-taking judge, accepting payment with one hand while condemning a petitioner with the other. In choosing cash over justice, the judge succumbs to money’s all-powerful corrupting influence. The matter is put most simply by St Paul: ‘Love of money is the root of all evil.’ The point is clear: money is dirty and those who greedily pursue it are bound to muddy both their hands and their souls.
This chapter will challenge this received wisdom. And at the outset, let me just say that, far from being the root or indeed any organ of evil, money isn’t half as sinister as you or St Paul might think.
Happiness for sale
One of the only things we enjoy more than damning the rich is pitying them. Those of us accustomed to the unpleasant sensation of the bottom of our pockets want to believe that the rich are pitiable souls, misguidedly chasing pound after useless pound on the path to inevitable depression and emptiness. It is commonly said that money doesn’t buy happiness, and the financially challenged among us hope that this is true. But are we right?
The simple fact is that the more money people have, the happier they are. Rich countries are happier than poor countries and, within the borders of any one nation, the haves are happier than the have-nots. What’s more, the effects of money on our well-being are varied. The rich are more satisfied with their lives, they have more positive experiences, they feel more enjoyment, and they experience less boredom, depression and sadness than the poor.2 In a recent and rigorous review of the literature, two young economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, concluded:
Income is positively related to wanting to have more days like yesterday, with feeling well rested, with feeling treated with respect, with being able to choose how to spend one’s time, with smiling or laughing, with feeling proud, with having done something interesting, and with eating good-tasting food.3
Varied they may be, but the benefits of higher income are by no means guaranteed. The greedy can have all the money they want and still not get it quite right. In fact, when it comes to the purchase of happiness, it’s very much a case of buyer beware. In spending your money on the good life, it’s important to know what to buy.
A few years ago, Lexus ran an ad campaign with the following slogan: ‘Whoever said money can’t buy happiness isn’t spending it right.’
This is a little smug coming from a luxury car company, but there is some truth in it.
As with much of psychology, philosophers got there first. So it is with the question of how to shop for happiness. Aristotle noted that although ‘men fancy that external goods are the cause of happiness’ it is ‘leisure of itself [which] gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment in life’.4 In this observation, Aristotle hits on one of the most important distinctions on the supermarket shelves: experiences versus material goods. Let’s rephrase Aristotle slightly for the modern consumer: is it better to do or to have?
With this question in mind, the social psychologists Leaf Van Boven of the University of Colorado and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University asked a group of college students to recall a purchase they had made ‘with the intention of advancing [their] happiness and enjoyment in life’.5 More specifically, they asked half of these students to recall an ‘experiential’ purchase – a purchase of more than £60 that involved ‘spending money with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience – an event or series of events that you personally encounter or live through’. They asked the other half about a ‘material’ purchase – a purchase of more than £60 that involved ‘spending money with the primary intention of acquiring a material possession – a tangible object that you obtain and keep in your possession’. As you would expect of college students, travel, dining out and admission fees to concerts and ski slopes ranked highly among the experiential buys; clothes, jewellery, computers, TVs and stereos were among the material.
The students then answered some questions about their purchases: how much did the purchase contribute to happiness? Was it money well spent? Proving Aristotle right (and not for the first time), experiential purchases made people happier than material ones and were thought to be better financial investments. The pleasures of the restaurant and the ski slopes outweighed those of clothes, jewellery and TVs.
Now, college students aren’t the most representative bunch. Does this pattern of results hold more generally? To answer this, Van Boven and Gilovich conducted a large-scale survey of over 1,200 Americans.6 Over half (57 per cent) said that buying an experience made them happier than buying a material possession; only 34 per cent of respondents said the opposite (the remaining 9 per cent weren’t sure or declined to answer).
So what’s so special about experiences? Why does dining out make us happier than buying clothes? For Van Boven and Gilovich, experiential purchases trump material purchases for a number of reasons.
Experiences, more so than material possessions, are important defining features of who we are. Material goods do define us, of course – think about what your clothes or CD collection say about you. It’s just that experiences do it better. This question should illustrate the point:
If your house caught fire, what is the one possession you would save?
Most people say they’d save their photo albums – the document of their life experiences.7
Another reason that experiences bring happiness is that they are often shared – they involve other people. Dining out or going to the theatre or to the cinema are all activities we enjoy with others. And because other people play such a large role in our happiness, shared experiences contribute substantially to our well-being.
Finally, experiences age well. Unlike material possessions, whose unchanging physical realities are quickly adapted to, experiences, once lived, exist as memories, open to reinvention and reinterpretation. We may tire of material possessions, but we can constantly reinterpret the memories of our experiences through our proverbial rose-coloured glasses. For example, when supporters of George W. Bush were asked how happy they had felt on the day when Bush was elected in 2000, they remembered (four months after the fact) feeling much happier than they actually had been at the time.8
So the greedy pursuit of money can pay off if we know how to spend the cash we acquire. Money can indeed buy happiness, but we must exercise caution. We must remember that with more money often comes more stress and more responsibility.9 And no matter how much of it you have, if you don’t have people to share it with, money won’t do you much good.10 In fact, psychologists are beginning to understand that when it comes to happiness, the purchasing power of the pound may pale against other, less tangible currencies. According to psychologists Ed Diener of the University of Illinois and Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, social relationships, enjoyment at work, and health are big contributors to happiness.11 Money helps, but it’s not all there is to it.
Nevertheless, the general rule holds: as income goes up, so does happiness. With quiet confidence in this relationship, we can next ask one final and important question: how much is enough? Is there an income beyond which I don’t get as much ‘happiness bang’ for my quid? The jury is still out on this point. Some research shows that once people hit a middle-class income, additional money doesn’t make them that much happier; but other work shows sizable happiness increments all the way up to yearly incomes of £125,000 and above.12
All in all, the greedy among us are on the right track when it comes to happiness. But there are no guarantees. And just as we should be aware of money’s limits in buying the good life, so should we appreciate that money does more than simply buy us things. According to Diener, money makes us happy in many other ways: the act of making money itself can be enjoyable, as can the act of spending it.13 But money grants another important blessing: it’s a powerful motivator.
The money motive
When I was a kid, I’d play pickup basketball at the schoolyard court across the street from my house. I wasn’t particularly tall or fast or, for that matter, particularly good. I’d make the occasional basket and the occasional assist. But one Saturday afternoon, I remember, it seemed that I could do no wrong on the court. I was fouled early on and made both free throws. From then on, I made every shot I attempted. Disappointingly, this was a one-time experience. The following week I went back to being regular old average on the court. But for that one Saturday I had entered ‘the zone’.
Be it during the weekend pickup game, the World Series, or the Super Bowl, it’s the goal of every sportsperson to enter that semi-mystical state. When one enters the zone, all things are said to move in slow motion, all perception becomes finely tuned, and, most important, one scores a hell of a lot of points or goals or touchdowns or whatever.
The zone – or the ‘hot hand phenomenon’, as it is sometimes called – has not escaped the attention of social psychologists. The bad news for athletes, however, is that this elusive state may not exist. In a classic study, the psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky reviewed the shooting stats of the Philadelphia 76ers and the Boston Celtics, looking for evidence of hot hands.14 From the point of view of a statistician, a basketball player has a hot hand if he is more likely to make a basket after one or more successful shots than after one or more misses. In other words, the key characteristic of the hot hand is its ‘streakiness’ – the stringing together of consecutive baskets. Despite long and careful analysis of a mountain of stats, Gilovich and his colleagues found no evidence of the hot hand phenomenon on the basketball court.
Now, NBA players are paid a hell of a lot, but they’re not really rewarded for putting in streaky performances. They’re expected to make baskets, but not necessarily to make back-to-back, consecutive strings of baskets. But what if players were paid for streakiness? Could the promise of money actually create hot hands?
The economists Todd McFall, Charles Knoeber, and Walter Thurman wanted to know whether the introduction of monetary incentives for streaky performance would create hot hands (hot clubs perhaps?) on the golf course.15 To do this, they made use of a fortuitous event in the history of the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) Tour.
The prestigious PGA Tour consists of about forty-five tournaments played over the course of a year. Players who do well in each tournament get paid; those who do poorly don’t. For a long time there was no real incentive for performing well in back-to-back tournaments. Of course, the better a player’s performance in any one tournament, the more money he’d get, but there was no real incentive for racking up a streak. However, in 1987, the Tour Championship (originally called the Nabisco Championship) was introduced. Entry into this lucrative end-of-season tournament depends on players’ performance throughout the Tour, and only the top thirty money earners at season’s end gain entry.
How did McFall and his colleagues make use of this fact in examining the effects of money on the hot hand? Here’s how.
They reasoned that, before any particular tournament during the season, a player falls into one of the three groups:
Group 1: Those who already have a spot in the Tour Championship
Group 2: Those who have some chance of getting a spot
Group 3: Those who have pretty much no hope of a spot in the Tour Championship
Next, they reasoned that as the season progresses, the composition and size of each of these groups changes. At the beginning of the season, most players are in group 2, with some chance of making the championship, but as the season progresses more and more players move into groups 1 and 3. Towards the end of the season, with just a few tournaments left, there are relatively few players in group 2, as most have already either guaranteed themselves a spot in the championship (group 1) or have no chance of making the cut (group 3).
Finally, McFall reasoned that players’ motivation for streaky performance would depend on both the group they’re in and the time left until the end of season. And it’s this last insight that allowed McFall and his colleagues to test whether the promise of money created hot hands.
Here’s the thinking: players at the top of the money list towards the beginning of the season have an extra incentive for streaky performance because they can secure their spot in the Tour Championship with a run of strong, back-to-back early performances. With this done, they can then ease off a little towards the end of the season. These players have the incentive to put in early-season streaky performance. However, those who find themselves in group 2 near season’s end have an extra incentive for streaky end-of-season performance, as they try desperately to make the championship cut-off.
With this logic in mind, McFall compared the top-ranked to the thirtieth-ranked player at different stages during the season, while controlling for various nuisance factors such as player ability, course difficulty and so forth. He predicted that towards the beginning of the season the top-ranked player would outperform the thirtieth-ranked player because of the increased motivation for early-season streakiness. And this is exactly what he found. The list leader performed about 0.13 strokes better than the thirtieth-ranked player. (Remember that player ability was taken into account, so this difference is not due to the top-ranked player simply being a better golfer.)
What should happen towards the end of the season? Well, at season’s end, the thirtieth-ranked player is vying for a spot in the Tour Championship and should be trying extra hard to make the cut; the top-ranked player is guaranteed a spot, so can ease off. So the streakiness trend should reverse. And this is what happened. With just one tournament left before the championship, the thirtieth-ranked player performed about 0.56 strokes better than the top-ranked player (adjusted for ability and other factors). Importantly, this difference in performance as a function of time of season and money-list rank exists only after the 1987 introduction of the Tour Championship. Before this incentive was introduced, there was no hot hand in golf.
Two paradoxes of payment
The logic of the general rule is straightforward – if you want people to work harder and perform better, make the most of their greed and pay them. This is common sense and it is, on balance, empirically supported. It holds on the golf course, and it holds in the lab and the workplace – more money means harder work and better outcomes.16 But as with all rules, there are important exceptions. If you look closely enough, you will come across two very interesting paradoxes of payment that you should be wary of if you’re to make the most of greed as a motivational force.
Paradox 1: Extrinsic up, intrinsic down
Some years ago, the psychologist Edward L. Deci of the University of Rochester conducted an experiment that was to become one of the classics of social psychology.17 He was interested in the influence of money (and reward, more generally) on motivation. Deci built his study around an important distinction between two motivational types: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from love of a task itself. One plays the piano, for example, with intrinsic motivation if it is the playing of the piano per se that is the motivating factor. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, comes from outside. Money is a good example of an extrinsic motivator. Our pianist has extrinsic motivation if she plays for monetary reward. Deci was interested in the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. What would money do to one’s intrinsic motivational drive? Would tempting our pianist’s greedy nature with money for her performance increase her intrinsic motivation or for some reason quash it?
With such a question in mind, Deci invited people to participate in a laboratory study. This study involved taking part in three testing sessions, each on a different day. On the first day, participants arrived at the lab and found before them an experimenter, a selection of puzzle pieces, and some magazines (including – don’t you just love the seventies? – Playboy). Participants were told that they had thirteen minutes to build four shapes out of the puzzle pieces. A picture of each shape to be built was presented to participants on a piece of paper.
Now, at a certain point during the session, the experimenter left the room for eight minutes and observed participants through a one-way mirror. What Deci was interested in was how much of this ‘unsupervised’ time each participant would spend on the puzzle. He reasoned that those with high intrinsic motivation (or puzzle love) would spend the majority of their time on the puzzle and less time reading Playboy.
The second session looked much the same as the first, at least for some. For half the participants, the second session was an exact reconstruction of the first – experimenter, puzzle, Playboy. For the other half, however, a financial incentive for performance was introduced. These people were told that they would receive £1 for each shape that they built. As you would expect, those paid for their performance spent more of the unsupervised time on the puzzle (just over five minutes) than they had during the first, unpaid session (about four minutes). Those who weren’t paid spent about three and half minutes on the puzzle in each of their two sessions.
So far, the story is much the same as it was on the golf course: paying people for performance increases their motivation. But what happens when you take that payment away? In the third session, each participant performed the puzzle task again, but this time under the conditions of session 1; that is, no one was offered any money. So did being paid in session 2 increase or decrease participants’ intrinsic motivation during session 3? It actually decreased it. Those who had been previously paid spent considerably less of the unsupervised time on the puzzle task in session 3 (just three minutes and twenty seconds). Those who hadn’t been paid, once again spent about four minutes on the task. So although the lure of cash during session 2 increased motivation, when this extrinsic motivation was taken away, it took participants’ intrinsic motivation with it.
The reason is simple enough. If one sees oneself solving puzzles for money, then one comes to think that the only reason for solving puzzles is money. Take the money away and one removes the only source of motivation. Money steps in and buys off intrinsic motivation. The lesson here of course is that if you start paying for performance, you had better keep paying.
Paradox 2: There are some things money can’t buy
Take a look at these two lists of transactions:
You probably have no problem with the exchanges on list A. It’s perfectly reasonable to pay someone to clean your house and to exchange money for goods such as food or accommodation. But something might strike you as a little off about list B. If you’re like most, you believe that while cleaning services, food and houses can be bought and sold, motherly love, national service and democracy cannot. And although the Beatles got it right when they sang ‘money can’t buy me love’, they don’t seem to have gone far enough. Money also can’t buy (or at least in most people’s minds shouldn’t buy) honour, trust, or election outcomes. While some goods and services are subject to the rules of the market and are open to pricing, others are not.
The psychologist Philip Tetlock of the University of California at Berkeley calls the list-B transactions ‘taboo trade-offs’ and has shown that most people react to such exchanges with moral outrage; the mere mention of trading duty for sterling, and many folks fly way off the handle.18 Money simply doesn’t belong in the list B transactions. Family relations, national service and voting are domains of life governed by social and moral norms, not the norms of the market.
To understand why money is acceptable in some exchanges and not others, we need to appreciate that people think differently about different kinds of transactions.19 Some exchanges readily fit the market mould. In such situations, goods and services are traded for cash, and not a head turns. Your boss pays you for the hours you work, you pay the supermarket cashier for your groceries, and life goes merrily on. In these kinds of market exchanges, you weigh costs and benefits, attach prices to commodities, and generally let your inner economist have the run of things.
Other transactions (let’s call them ‘social transactions’) don’t fit the money market mould at all, and introducing market principles into such exchanges just won’t do. Paying mum for cooking a Sunday roast is not how things work, just as trying to buy votes and patriotic duty are deemed unethical. In such transactions, reciprocity and duty, not pounds and pence, are the appropriate currency.
Now, moral outrage is well and good when it comes to hypotheticals. We sit astride our high horses and rage at anyone who dares trade social goods for money, but how do we ourselves behave in such situations? Although the thought of others doing good deeds to satisfy their greed might make you indignant, what if someone offered you cash for helping an old lady across the street? Would you be more or less likely to do it? When it comes to actual behaviour, do we remain atop our noble steeds or do we dismount? Can greed be co-opted in service of the common good? To answer this question, let’s consider a very clever field experiment.
Every year in Israel there are a number of days on which schoolchildren go door to door soliciting donations for charity. They get nothing for this good work except the pleasant feeling that comes from doing a good deed. How would these well-intentioned kids behave if they were paid cash for their charitable efforts?
The economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini were interested in just this question when they designed a field study to test the effects of payment on charitable behaviour.20 They took one hundred and eighty Israeli school students and assigned them to different groups. One group did their door knocking under conditions typical of volunteer work: they were reminded of the importance of the cause and that society wished them well. These students were offered no monetary incentive for their efforts. Another group, after hearing the same speech about the cause and the gratitude of society, was offered payment of 1 per cent of the donations they collected. (Importantly, students were told that their payment would come out of the experimenters’ pockets, not from the collected donations.)
So how much did each group collect?
If a real monetary incentive for a good deed rubs people the wrong way as much as does the hypothetical case, we’d expect that donation collectors who were paid would perform worse than volunteers. In Gneezy and Rustichini’s study the unpaid volunteer group collected £43. (Donations were collected in new Israeli shekels, but I’ve done the currency conversion for you.) And those offered payment? Only £28 – a substantial £15 less than the volunteers.
These results suggest that being paid for charity work may, in fact, backfire. Just as people recoil at the notion of others doing good deeds for cash, so too do they underperform if they themselves are offered payment. This finding suggests that greed can’t be capitalized on to promote charitable works.
But consider an alternative explanation for the results. Perhaps payment backfired because the sum offered simply wasn’t large enough. Perhaps the offer of a meagre 1 per cent led to worse performance because it was perceived as insultingly small.
To test this possibility we need to consider the third group in Gneezy and Rustichini’s study. This group was offered payment of 10 per cent of the amount collected, rather than a paltry 1 per cent. Now, if people are simply rejecting the notion of being paid per se, we’d expect this group to also collect less than the no-payment group.
How much did the 10 per cent group collect? Actually, they collected almost as much as those offered no money at all – £39.
So when money is introduced into social transactions it may do more harm than good, but it depends on the sum. If the offer is too small, money may sabotage our good intentions. But if large enough, it doesn’t seem to do much harm. The moral of the story: if you want to make the most of greed in the promotion of good deeds, you’d better pay enough or not pay at all.
With money in mind
Money need not be dangled before us, carrot-style, in order to influence our actions. Even the very concept of money, if activated somewhere in our minds, may be enough to change our thinking and behaviour in quite astonishing ways. No one knows this better than social psychologist Kathleen Vohs. In a series of clever studies, Vohs has demonstrated just how powerful a grasp money has on our behaviour.
By now you should have realized that we social psychologists are a tricky bunch. When poor, unwitting participants come into a psychology lab, nothing is ever quite as it seems. Take one of Vohs’s first experiments on the power of money.21 When participants came into her lab, they were given a list of jumbled-up sentences. Some participants got a list that looked something like this:
flip coin now silver the
the wealthy is man bench
sky the seamless red is
intense the latch heat is
prepare the gift wrap neatly
some he cash red wants
Others got a list that looked more like this:
Regardless of the list they got, all participants had the same task: form meaningful, four-word sentences out of each set of words.
Do you notice anything different about these two lists? In the first list, half of the items contain ‘money’ words (cash, coin, wealthy). In the second list, none of the items contain money-related words. (In the actual study, each list contained thirty jumbled sentences, but hopefully you get the gist.) The point of this simple exercise is to very subtly prime participants with the concept of ‘money’. Unscrambling money-related sentences gets money-related thoughts ready (or primed) for action.
After unscrambling the word sets, participants were given an ‘insight problem’. When people do such problems they typically don’t have a sense that they are making progress – rather, the solution comes to them in a light-bulb moment, in a flash of insight. Here’s a classic example (the solution is in the Notes):
Connect all nine dots by drawing four straight lines without lifting your pen from the page and without retracing the lines.22
The insight problem that Vohs used was chosen carefully so that people wouldn’t be able to solve it too quickly. What Vohs was interested in was how long people would persist at the task before asking for help. Would those people subtly primed with ‘money’ be more or less likely to ask for help in solving the task? After about only four minutes, the task had most people in the control condition (those who unscrambled sentences without money words) bewildered, and almost 75 per cent had asked for help. People in the money-priming condition, however, were a lot more persistent – only after eight minutes had 75 per cent of these participants sought help with the task.
Why? Vohs argues that money priming makes people self-sufficient, which for Vohs involves ‘an emphasis on behaviours of one’s own choosing accomplished without active involvement from others’.23 In such a mind-set, people aren’t likely to ask for help, preferring to rely instead on their own abilities.
Just how far-ranging are the consequences of money priming and the money mind-set? To test the boundaries of this money-induced self-sufficiency effect, Vohs’s team brought another willing group of subjects into the lab.24 These participants were given either a stack of cash or a stack of cash-shaped pieces of paper to count. Each person counted out his or her stack as an ostensible finger-dexterity task. It should come as no surprise by now that this was just a cover story. The counting task was simply a way of priming ‘money’ for some of the participants (those counting cash). After this, the experimenters rather unceremoniously plunged participants’ hands into a bucket of hot water. The money-primed felt less pain!
This is more compelling stuff: the mere idea of money makes us resistant to pain? Just as physical riches help make the wealthy more self-reliant, so too does the idea of money allow us to feel invulnerable, capable.
Does what goes for physical pain also go for social pain? In another of Vohs’s studies, she once again used the cash-counting manipulation to prime ‘money’, but this time, instead of plunging participants’ hands into hot water, she had them perform a social interaction task in which they were socially excluded.25 Once again, the money-primed participants were better off: they felt less hurt after being ostracized than those who counted paper. The money mind-set served as a buffer, this time against the social pain of ostracism.
It is in this last finding that the greedy, money mind-set reveals its two faces. In placing confidence in the self, one tends to feel less need for others. Such self-reliance may have varied and positive consequences, as discussed earlier, but it may also have negative consequences.
Greedy individuals who chronically have ‘money on the brain’ are often condemned as being selfish and heartless. There might seem something to this view at first glance.
One of the mental shifts that accompany the money mind-set is a reduction in what we psychologists call perspective taking. This is simply the ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes and see the world through their eyes. We have various ways of measuring it. Here’s one of the most interesting – try it:
With the index finger of your dominant hand (the one you write with) trace the letter ‘S’ on your forehead.
That’s all there is to it. How does this simple exercise measure our ability to see the world through another’s eyes? It’s all in the direction of the ‘S’ that you drew. If you began your ‘S’ at the top right of your forehead and moved your finger to the left, then you drew an ‘S’ as it would look from your own perspective. In other words, you didn’t put yourself in the shoes of another. If, however, you began your ‘S’ at the top left and traced your finger to the right, then you did put yourself in another’s shoes – the ‘S’ you drew is the right way round for someone looking at your forehead.
In another of Vohs’s studies, some participants performed this exact task.26 Other participants did something slightly different. They were asked to draw a ‘$’ on their foreheads. The $ version of the task is physically very similar, but conceptually very different to the ‘plain S’ task – it primes the concept of money. What did Vohs find when she had participants do these tasks? Those who drew the dollar sign were less likely to put themselves in the shoes of another than those who did the task with a regular old ‘S’.
If money-primed people are less likely to see the world through the eyes of others, are they also less likely to help others? In another clever experiment, Vohs and her colleagues looked at whether priming people with money influenced their helping behaviour.27 This time, when participants arrived at the lab they found the board game Monopoly laid out on a table before them. Subjects played Monopoly for a short time with a stooge in Vohs’s employ and then the critical manipulation was made.
After a while, the experimenter cleared away the board to make room for the next task. However, while for some participants the game was cleared away entirely, for others, the experimenter ‘inadvertently’ left $4,000 of Monopoly money on the table. To further boost this money prime, the $4,000 group was asked to imagine a future filled with abundant finances. The other participants, the controls, were asked to think about their plans for the next day.
Having firmly activated ‘money’ in the minds of some, it was time to test their helping behaviour. To do this, Vohs staged an accident. She had another confederate walk across the lab carrying a folder and a box of pencils. When the confederate reached the participant, she spilled the pencils all over the floor. The experimenters were interested in how many pencils the participants would pick up. What they found was that money-primed participants picked up significantly fewer pencils than those in the control condition.
This all looks like rather bad news for the chronically money-primed greedy. But although this lack of help may be thought selfishness by some, it is important to consider these results together with Vohs’s other findings. A closer look suggests that it is not selfishness that accounts for what’s happening here. A selfish person would try to maximize their benefits at all costs. But remember the first of Vohs’s studies: money-primed people waited longer than control participants before asking for help on a difficult task. The selfish participant would presumably have asked for help almost immediately in order to solve the problem as quickly as possible.
According to Vohs, the money mind-set is not intrinsically selfish, but rather self-sufficient. In fact, far from being imbued with an immoral selfishness, this mind-set may have its own kind of morality built into it. In addition to making people self-sufficient, money priming also emphasizes market exchange principles. Thinking about money leads people to focus on aspects of the marketplace, like transaction and exchange, costs and benefits, inputs and outputs and so on. As Vohs argues, because of their focus on market rules, money-primed people may prefer exchange relationships (in which they receive something for any helpful act they perform) that are regulated by the highly democratic (and not at all immoral) norm of equity.
Our relationship with money is complex. On the one hand, it can make us happier, more motivated and self-sufficient – all consequences that count in favour of the greedy pursuit of the pound. On the other hand, it has the potential to sabotage our motives and make us less helpful. And if we value money too much, become too materialistic, and forget about friends and family, we can get trapped in a maze of destructive choices.
The complexity of this relationship springs partly from the fact that money acts on our minds in two basic ways. According to the psychologists Stephen Lea and Paul Webley of the University of Exeter, England, money can be seen both as a tool and as a drug.28
If we see money as a tool, a mere instrument of exchange or an incentive, things tend to go quite well. Tools are simply instruments we use to achieve more valued ends. Just as a hammer is useful in building a table, so too is money helpful in achieving happiness, performance and self-sufficiency.
But money also has powerful addictive properties – it can take hold of us like a drug. When this happens, money is no longer a means to an end, no longer a tool we use to gain some reward, but the end itself. When greed becomes an addiction, we’re in trouble. As soon as we start to sacrifice our friends, family and other aspirations to the pursuit of cash, things start to go wrong.