Market Cognition: How Exchange Norms Alter Social Experience

Abstract

Market exchange and the ideologies that accompany it pervade human social interaction. How does this affect people’s beliefs about themselves, each other, and human nature? Here we describe market cognition as social inferences and behaviors that are intensified by market contexts. We focus on prosociality and two countervailing ways in which market cognition can affect it. On the one hand, marketplaces incentivize individuals to behave prosocially in order to be chosen as exchange partners—thereby generalizing cooperation and trust beyond group boundaries. On the other hand, markets encourage a view of people as self-interested and can thus taint people’s interpretation of prosocial actions and erode more communal forms of cooperation. We close by considering how market cognition can become self-fulfilling, altering relationships, communities, and cultural norms.

Market mindset hinders interpersonal trust: The exposure to market relationships makes people trust less through elevated proportional thinking and reduced state empathy

“…We explore how people's willingness to trust others depends on their exposure to market-pricing relationships. Our results suggest that interpreting social reality through the prism of the market mindset-an archetype of rationality and self-efficiency (Fiske & Haslam, 2005;Persky, 1995;Zaki et al, 2021)-has a hampering effect on interpersonal trust in line with some commonsense predictions. We also investigate the psychological mechanisms behind this effect.…”

“…As Fiske (1992) proposed almost 30 years ago, Market pricing is so pervasive in Western society and so important in the Western cultural conceptions of human nature and society that many theorists have postulated that all human social behavior is based on more or less rational calculations of cost-benefit ratios in self-interested exchange. (p. 706) When people engage in market relationships, they use a distinctive "mental grammar" that could be denominated as "market cognition" (Zaki et al, 2021). In the present work, we use the term "market mindset" to describe mental attributes people use to cognise, evaluate, and coordinate with each other and suggest that those with such a mindset primarily care about how much they get out of their investment and whether the repayment would be of comparable value.…”

“…When people engage in market relationships, they use a distinctive “mental grammar” that could be denominated as “market cognition” (Zaki et al, 2021). In the present work, we use the term “market mindset” to describe mental attributes people use to cognise, evaluate, and coordinate with each other and suggest that those with such a mindset primarily care about how much they get out of their investment and whether the repayment would be of comparable value.…”

“…Although some evidence suggests a detrimental effect of market cognition on trust (e.g., Xin & Liu, 2013), the detailed mechanisms behind this effect have surprisingly never been explored. In this project, we propose two psychological mechanisms that could explain why the market mindset hampers trust: amplified proportional thinking and a reduced state empathy—both inevitably related to market cognition (Zaki et al, 2021; Zaleskiewicz et al, 2017, 2020). In the following section, we elaborate more on these two processes that might operate when an individual with the market mindset considers whether to trust another person or not.…”

Is status a zero-sum game? Zero-sum beliefs increase people’s preference for dominance but not prestige.

“…Zero-sum situations inversely link people’s outcomes to each other, requiring them to gain by directly or indirectly harming others. It is therefore unsurprising that zero-sum beliefs are associated with negative interpersonal expectations such as reduced trust (Różycka-Tran et al, 2015), a tendency to attribute hostile intentions to others’ behaviors (Andrews Fearon et al, 2021), and general cynicism about society (Zaki et al, 2021). Because gaining rank in a (seemingly) zero-sum hierarchy requires diminishing others’ rank, people who view social hierarchies as zero-sum may expect others to follow a similar logic.…”