Abstract. The self-sufficiency hypothesis suggests that priming individuals with money makes them focus more strongly on themselves than on others. However, recently, research supporting this claim has been heavily criticized and some attempts to replicate have failed. A reason for the inconsistent findings in the field may lay in the common use of explicit measures, because they tend to rely on one or just a few items and are thus prone to demand effects and low reliability. In the present research, we administered, in two experiments, the imitation-inhibition task – a robust, unobtrusive, and reliable paradigm that is sensitive to self-other focus on a trial-by-trial basis. A pilot study found an increased focus on the self as compared to others when primed with money. Building on this finding, a preregistered high-powered experiment replicated this effect, suggesting that money primes may indeed increase a focus on the self. An additionally carried out meta-analysis indicates that automatic imitation is modulated by self-other focus and that money primes lead to a smaller focus on the self than conventional methods. Overall, the found effects are rather small and several limitations, such as order effects, call for a cautious interpretation of the findings.
Two studies demonstrated that subjective socioeconomic status moderates the effects of reminders of money on the endorsement of the socioeconomic system. Whether reminders of money increased or decreased system justification (Study 1) and the belief in a just world (Study 2) depended on participants’ subjectively experienced standing in the social hierarchy. These findings were backed up by a small-scale meta-analysis across our entire data (N = 365). Hence, we also included a third study into the meta-analysis, in which the manipulation check indicated that the mental activation of money was comparably weak. This research offers new insights into the psychological mechanisms of money primes and reveals that interindividual differences, such as whether one feels privileged or not, can moderate the effects of money primes.
When researchers fail to control for confounding factors, the causes of behavior can be more apparent than real, even in experimental research. The current study replicates an experiment by Weinstein, Przybylski, and Ryan (2009) with the goal of demonstrating that their main fi nding could have resulted from diff erences in people's prosocial propensity. In their research, they found their hypothesized interaction eff ect: depending on the extent of immersion, participants presented with images of nature were found to be more prosocial in both their actions and in their declarations. Our sample of 175 adults (M age = 29.7 yr., SD = 11.7; 97 men, 78 women) was approached personally, randomly assigned to viewing either urban or nature images, and instructed to immerse themselves in the respective images. Using two formally distinct measures of participants' prosocial propensity (i.e., before and after the intervention), the hypothesis that individual diff erences in people's prosocial propensity can bias conclusions about the origins of prosocial behavior in experimental research was supported. To avoid invalid conclusions, the prosocial propensity levels of research participants should be controlled for.
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