Faculty Articles

Show Me the Money: A Systematic Exploration of Manipulations, Moderators, and Mechanisms of Priming Effects.

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS

ISSN

1467-9280

Publication Date

8-1-2017

Abstract

A major challenge for accumulating knowledge in psychology is the variation in methods and participant populations across studies in a single domain. We offer a systematic approach to addressing this challenge and implement it in the domain of money priming. In three preregistered experiments ( N = 4,649), participants were exposed to one of a number of money manipulations before completing self-report measures of money activation (Study 1); engaging in a behavioral-persistence task (Study 3); completing self-report measures of subjective wealth, self-sufficiency, and communion-agency (Studies 1-3); and completing demographic questions (Studies 1-3). Four of the five manipulations we tested activated the concept of money, but, contrary to what we expected based on the preponderance of the published literature, no manipulation consistently affected any dependent measure. Moderation by sociodemographic characteristics was sparse and inconsistent across studies. We discuss implications for theories of money priming and explain how our approach can complement recent efforts to build a reproducible, cumulative psychological science.

DOI

10.1177/0956797617706161

Volume

28

Issue

8

First Page

1148

Last Page

1159

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