Poster #197 - When Lying Makes Cents: The Effect of Exposure to Currency on Children’s Self-Interested Behaviors

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Does exposure to money influence children’s self-interested behaviors? The current study explores how children develop different modes of interacting with the world, including "communal" modes, best used for interacting with individuals and small groups over time, and "market" modes, which inhibit prosociality and enhance economic interactions (Clark & Mills, 1993; Fiske, 1992). Research suggests that even young children shift to a market mode when exposed to money, even though their understanding of economic systems and currency is limited (Gasiorowska, Chaplin, Zaleskiewicz, Wygrab, & Vohs, 2015; Gasiorowska, Zaleskiewicz, & Wygrab, 2011). Previous research has shown that although people (adults and children) like to appear fair, they may act in an unfair manner when unobserved (Shaw, Max, Piovesan, Olson, Gino, & Norton, 2014). In the current study, we investigate how exposure to currency, and the related activation of the market mode, influences participant’s tendency to act in a self-interested manner when participating in a game where they might benefit from misleading experimenters.

We presented a group of younger (coin condition: N = 19, Mage = 5.12, SD = .47; token condition: N = 20, Mage = 4.93, SD = .62) and older children (coin condition: N = 26, Mage = 7.32, SD = .93; token condition: N = 26, Mage = 7.44, SD = .78) with a ‘game’ in which they were instructed to toss an item and report the results of their toss to a researcher. Children either tossed a coin or a two-color plastic token. In each condition, children were informed that they would receive a prize if their toss landed on a specified side of the coin/token, and they would not receive a prize if it landed on the other side. Children performed their toss behind an occluder. Thus, the experimenter was blind to the result. The child then reported the outcome of the toss.

A chi-square test of independence was performed to examine the relationship between condition and reported wins, by age group, see Figure 1. For younger children, there was a significant relationship between condition and reported wins, X2 (1, n = 39) = 6.62, p < .05, but this effect was not significant for older children. One-sample t-tests comparing children’s responses to chance (chance = .50) revealed that only the younger children in the coin condition reported winning at rates that exceeded chance (M = .95, SD = .23), p < .001.

Our results suggest that exposure to currency, and perhaps the resulting activation of the market mode, had the largest influence on younger children’s behavior. Additionally, older children reported a more likely distribution of outcomes for their tosses, despite the fact that the experimenter lacked the necessary information to verify their claims. This result suggests that older children’s desire to appear fair (see Shaw et al., 2014), or actually BE fair, outweighed their self-interest. Although younger children don’t understand many of the properties of currency (Webley, 2005), their behavior may have been the more influenced by exposure to money than older children.

Authors

• Catherine H. McDermott, University of Louisville
  Presenting Author

• Nicholaus Noles, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author