The holiday season has always had an odd mix of values, as thoughts of peace and goodwill jostle inside our brain like shoppers crowding a Boxing Day sale alongside nagging concerns about credit card balances and year-end bonuses.

A recent study — part of the growing field of behavioural economics — takes that disconnect between community and consumerism a step further, suggesting that even thinking about money can isolate an individual.

People who were primed with images of money were not only more self reliant, they were also less likely to help others, according to the findings of University of Minnesota marketing professor Kathleen Vohs.

A former Canada Research Chair in marketing science and consumer psychology at the University of British Columbia, Vohs conducted the experiments along with UBC graduate student Miranda Goode and Florida State graduate student Nicole Mead.

The experiments behind the study were simple. College student test subjects were split off into two groups: one was given subtle reminders to prompt their thoughts toward money, and the other group was given neutral stimuli. The subjects were then put in a number of social settings.

The result? People unconsciously primed with images of money turned out to be less helpful.

In one experiment, subjects were asked to fill out a form while a computer screen saver displayed either floating fish or floating dollar bills. They were then told they would be meeting another subject and were asked to bring chairs for the two of them to sit on. The researchers then measured the distance of the chairs from each other, and they found that people who were primed with images of money were more likely to put the chairs farther away.

A similar experiment had a research assistant enter the room and drop a box of pencils. Money-primed subjects picked up fewer pencils than their neutral-stimuli counterparts.

People who had been reminded of money also tended to be more self-reliant, according to the findings. In an experiment in which researchers gave subjects a difficult puzzle to solve and told them to ask for help at any time, the people reminded of money waited nearly 70 per cent longer to ask for help.

While such self-sufficiency can have both positive and negative effects, Vohs said the results show our psychological interaction with money is far more complex than it is often portrayed.

"It always bothered me that most people looked only at the desire for money, and that the bottom line was if you wanted money you had problems," she said.

Behavioural economics

Vohs's paper, The Psychological Consequences of Money, published in the Nov. 17 issue of Science, is part of a growing trend to capture the impact of money on the brain through something called behavioural economics.

The relatively new field, described in a March cover story of Harvard Magazine as a "hybrid offspring of economics and psychology," has met with some resistance from economists. New York University game theorist and former Econometric Society president Ariel Rubinstein published a scathing critique of the field last year, arguing it was not self-critical enough to be taken seriously. "Intuitive and 'sexy' results are gladly accepted by behavioral economists without sufficient criticism," he wrote.

Neuroscientists have also tended to ignore the effects of money in fields such as the study of empathy, though it has been used as a tool in experiments as a means of testing other responses.

But the potential impact of a deeper understanding of how money affects our decision-making is undeniable, even if the results of behavioural economics studies are not fully understood.

Volunteers

The theory that money affects a person's willingness to help others appears to be at odds with the available statistics, Volunteer Canada president Marlene Deboisbriand told CBC News Online.

"The results are somewhat perplexing," said Deboisbriand. "Our experience is that people tend to be more generous with money than they are of time. Time is the biggest barrier to volunteering."

The 2004 Statistics Canada study on volunteerism found income level also had less of an impact on volunteerism than one might expect. Among a list of factors contributing to the likelihood of a person volunteering, income was less important than a person's life-cycle stage, such as their age and whether they had children. But Vohs's study was concerned less with an individual's financial circumstances than the idea of money, a difficult thing to chart in a national survey.

Carole Burgoyne, a University of Exeter professor in economic psychology, said in an e-mail to CBC News Online that the results of Vohs's study coincide with past work in the field.

"My research on money in relationships shows that two value systems tend to come into conflict — the values associated with love and care that tend to aim for equal outcomes regardless of input, and the 'equity' based value that says outcomes should be proportional to contributions," she said.

Money and relationships

But money can also have surprising and long-lasting effects when introduced into social relationships, said Burgoyne.

Two studies of day cares in Israel conducted by Aldo Rustichini of the University of Minnesota and Uri Gneezy of the University of Chicago are considered prime examples of how these relationships can change.

The Rustichini studies, published in 2000 and 2005, found day-care facilities that instituted a fine on parents who collected their children later than a specified time led to more parents turning up late rather than fewer. The fine, the authors argued, was interpreted as a "price" for lateness some parents were prepared to pay.

Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the number of late-arriving parents did not go down when the day cares removed the fee. "What this tells us is that it is dangerous to bring money into the picture, because once a social contract has been turned into a financial-economic one, it is very difficult to change it back," she said.

Both Vohs and Burgoyne said more research is needed to properly assess money's impact on our decision-making. But it's clear the research could affect policies both large and small: from the broader social implications of advertising or government incentive programs, to personal decisions such as whether parents encourage their children to keep a piggy bank.

"If it's more important to have self-motivation it might be good to have reminders of money," Vohs said. "If group harmony is important, it might be a good idea to keep the idea of money down. People will have to decide what goals are in the best interest."

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