Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Money is an essential part of our everyday life and occupies our minds daily. The desire to obtain money is one of the strongest motivators of the modern world (Lea and Webley, 2006). In neoclassical economics, the paradigm of utility maximization yields gathering as much money as possible, see Smith (1976) for the foundation of monetary incentives in experimental economics to induce subjects’ value. What is the psychological impact of this attraction to money on human beings? Experimental findings suggest that even subtle reminders of money can change individual behavior. The concept of money stimulates the propensity for autonomy (Liu, et al., 2010). Money activates a self-sufficient orientation – people prefer to be free of dependency and become less helpful and less sensitive to the needs of others (Vohs et al., 2006, 2008). Gąsiorowska et al. (2016) observe these behavioral patterns even with a sample of children from 3 to 6 years. Does dealing with money lead to unsocial behavior? Do we have to be afraid that jobs in the domain of economics trigger egoism in social groups?
A great part of studying economics deals with the concept of money, which may act as a form of priming1. Experiments with students of economics show that these are more corrupt than students of other disciplines (Frank and Schulze, 2000). Furthermore, they assume others to take self-interested decisions and distrust them (Carter and Irons, 1991; Frank et al., 1993a; Wang et al. 2011).2 Thus, money priming could negatively affect social behavior by diminishing subjects’ concerns about social goals and by increasing concentration on their private goals (Piff et al., 2012). This may disrupt interpersonal ties and group formation, e.g. by decreasing trust and altruism. As a result, socially beneficial outcomes might not be achieved – especially when cooperation is needed (e.g., for providing public goods).
Findings from experimental literature suggest that the feeling of belonging to a group has a positive impact on social preferences (Chen and Li, 2009). Experiments utilizing arbitrarily created experimental groups revealed increased cooperation within the group in the prisoner’s dilemma game (Charness et al., 2007), more trust in the trust game (Hargreaves et al., 2009), and higher contributions to the group account in the public goods game (Koopmans and Rebers, 2009). In experiments utilizing real social groups, social ties lead to an even stronger increase in cooperation within the group (Goette et al., 2006, 2012).
This overview suggests that money priming harms but group identity stimulates pro-social behavior. In our paper, we are interested in answering which of these two effects – money priming or solidarity – has a bigger impact on pro-social behavior in natural groups3 with differing strengths of social ties. To test this, we let two natural groups independently participate in simple bargaining and dilemma experiments. The first group consists of civilian students (with weak social ties) and the second of military students, who also work together as soldiers (strong social ties).