Psychology of Money: What Do We Want To Know?
This week PsyBlog is dedicated to the psychology of money.
Over the next week or so I hope you'll join me on a journey into the psychology of money. Send me your questions as we explore our sometimes strange, sometimes passionate, always complex relationship with filthy lucre:
- Why some people are so obsessed with it, why others don't care.
- How we decide what to spend it on.
- Why things cost the amount they do.
And many more questions I haven't thought of yet! I'll be looking at psychological studies, theories about money and running some polls to reveal our attitudes.
So please send me any queries about the psychology of money that you'd like answering. Hit me up in the comments section or email me. Any aspect of money you like as long as it has a psychological angle.
I'll be doing my best to answer your questions and I hope you'll be able to enlighten me as well.
[Image credit: AMagill]
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I am very excited to read this one!! Extrinsic reward and all that jazz. I'm a sophmore Psych major (who is a little more than passionate about his major) and I have to say that, you give a nerd something to read haha.
Ooh, what a broad subject! Things I've seen on the internet make me wonder about the difference between how men and women view money. In an anonymous forum, you hear attitudes people would never speak out loud to people who know them. I wonder how prevalent such cynical views really are.
Wow, sounds interesting. I am looking forward to reading this week's post.
A long time ago I set the topic "Pay is a motivator" as a debate for a large class of 2nd/3rd year Psych Honors students. A 2nd year piped up rather disdainfully. Of course pay is a motivator. Money is a secondary reinforcer and any psychologist who is worth her salt would know that.
Mmmmm. . .
One of the more practical things I have been involved in has been the management of pay structures in large organizations. There are a lot of good rules of thumb, all loosely based on classical psychology principles for efficiently bringing together the vast mass of decisions that have to be made for pay to be fair and motivating within in an organization . . . if you are interested.
I want to know
1, What is one's target amount (of course inflation adjusted) of money?
2, Why money is addictive? Is it money or power that money gives is addictive?
3, If I give you the target amount today, what will you do with rest of your life?
4, I think 3rd question is being answered by 4th or vice versa: why money need is insatiable?
I'd like to know how much findings from neuroeconomics actually say about human selfishness, cooperation/defection strategies and altruism when it seems that "priming" someone with the concept of money (or "framing" a problem in monetary terms) causes people to use a different part of their brain, as explained in your previous post.
Maybe all those experiments need to be redone in a "social" context?
If group performance in social contexts is better, this might hint that using monetary transactions for coordinating activities blocks humans from realizing their collective potential.