According to a fascinating series of studies by the University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois, children asked to sort money drives young children to work, work, work! In several comparison studies, children asked to sort money worked faster and worked for longer than children asked to sort crayons, buttons, or candies. This was true for children as young as 3 years old, who had only the vaguest concepts of what money was for — and it held true no matter what denomination was used.
But that’s only the beginning of the oddity, because it turns out that children asked to sort money were affected during their next task as well — and they were affected in some startling ways.
- Children were asked to sort, and then given a choice of taking a number of stickers between one and six, chosen by the child. Children who sorted money all took a minimum of 3 stickers; children who sorted buttons or candy were 20-25% likely to choose to take only 1 or 2 stickers.
- Then, those same children were told that they could voluntarily choose to share some stickers with other children who didn’t get the opportunity to sort. And (surprise!) the children who sorted money gave, on average, less than half as many stickers away as the children who sorted buttons or candy.
- In another variation, after sorting money or buttons, children were asked to help the researchers prepare for the next (fictional) task by helping gather crayons. The children who had sorted money gathered fewer crayons per minute and worked for less time before deciding they ‘had helped’ and were done.
According to Kathleen Vohs, the head of the study, these results are closely mirrored by other studies that examined adults, and by similar studies performed on adults and children from around the world, including Asian, European, and North American samples. Lan Chaplin, one of the study’s organizers, said, “Our findings with children as young as 3 years old suggest potentially significant implications for achievement, generosity, and interpersonal harmony.”
“Money is a double-edged sword,” said Vohs. “It produces good outcomes in terms of concentration and effort, but bad outcomes when it comes to helping, taking, and donating.”
Editorial
The effect of simply handling money is to encourage work hard and fast — but it also created an attitude of entitlement (taking more stickers), unhelpfulness (gathering less crayons), and lack of charity (giving away fewer stickers.) All of this in children who simply sorted money, without having a chance to keep any, and without even being grown up enough to understand the value of what they were handling. Just knowing that it was money was enough to send a child into “gotta work, work, work” mode.
This may go a very long way toward explaining why the wealthy give less when money becomes tight, but the middle class and poor give more in those same situations. It might also go a long way toward explaining why the wealthy believe the proven lie that hard work is able to compensate for social disadvantages — when you see money, you switch into ‘work mode,’ and work seems like the answer, no matter what the question is. When you aren’t in work mode, other options seem more viable.
And in the end, as it turns out, money really isn’t the answer. As one observant and rigorous nurse notes, of all of the deathbed regrets she heard in years and years of providing palliative care for the terminally ill, none of them involved money. What were they?
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
- I wish I didn’t work so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Notice that 1, 2, possibly 3 and 4, and almost certainly 5 all directly fall under the umbrella of ‘spending too much time in work mode.’ We as Americans work more hours, with fewer vacation days, with fewer benefits than any other developed nation on Earth, yet more than half of the workers in this country earn less than $30,000 each year. But in the end, all our obsession with money does it make us less charitable, less helpful, and more entitled.
Hmm…maybe entitlement actually is a problem in America, after all. Just like the moochers.
(Featured image courtesy of free pictures of money via Flicker, shared using a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)
