Banking institutions allow us to purchase homes for 20% of their value, codes of law give us the right to own those homes, and monetary systems enable the exchange of the value we have for the homes we want. Social institutions do not only grant us shelter but govern much of human life. It is no surprise then that academic disciplines such as economics (e.g., Schotter, 2008), sociology (e.g., Giddens, 1984), anthropology (e.g., Evans-Pritchard, 1952, and philosophy (e.g., Searle, 2010) are concerned with understanding the emergence of social institutions. 1 Although social psychologists have focused on the psychological attitudes, beliefs, and processes that maintain social institutions (e.g., Fiske, 1992;Jost, 2020;Sidanius & Pratto, 2004), and how those social institutions impact individual psychology and behavior (e.g., Tankard & Paluck, 2017;Vohs et al., 2006), social psychological factors that lead to the emergence of social institutions have received less attention. Here, we investigate what compels people to hesitate at the destruction of novel currency, potentially imbuing it with respect. Specifically, we examine whether people are more hesitant to destroy a novel bill when it is known by a greater number of people in one's social group.We create a fictional currency and vary its social knowledge across conditions. We reason that a currency gains respect (reflected in a higher reluctance to destroy it) when a person believes that more members of their group simply know about the currency. That is, as knowledge of a currency becomes more widespread, the odds of its future use increase. Put differently, because currencies can only be useful 2 when they are known to many in 1 Sociologists regard governments, families, currencies, universities, hospitals, corporations, and even human languages as social institutions (Miller, 2019). At its core, a social institution creates, governs, and sustains patterns of human co-existence and cooperation. A social institution is no ordinary object, it is a socially shared fiction (Harari, 2014) that affords humans small-and large-scale collective action.2 Critically, even though we are making a functionalist argument for the importance of social knowledge-money is useful to the extent it is known by many-we do not suggest that people necessarily know or perceive money that is known by many to be more useful. That is, people's behavior conforms to the proposed argument, without people's knowledge of the argument. Indeed, as our results suggest, widespread knowledge of money does not increase perceptions of its utility, or value.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.