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Can Money and Religion Substitute For Each Other? Ezgi Akpinar, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands Kathleen Vohs, University of Minnesota, USA

Money and religion are two central forces that drive human behavior. We tested the hypothesis that money and religion can substitute for each other. As predicted, we found that reminders of money led to less reliance on religious coping, whereas reminders of religion weakened participants’ desire for money, and that this effect was because religion made people feel efficacious.

[to cite]: Ezgi Akpinar and Kathleen Vohs (2011) ,"Can Money and Religion Substitute For Each Other? ", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 38, eds. Darren W. Dahl, Gita V. Johar, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research.

[url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/15835/volumes/v38/NA-38

[copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/. 852 / Working Papers To test this prediction, study 1 was conducted. Participants (n=52) were given either one Trinidad and Tobago dollar bill or one Trinidad and Tobago dollar coin and were asked how much of each of nine inexpensive items (e.g. pencils, paper clips) they could buy with that money. Participants were also asked to estimate how many Canadian dollars they could purchase with the money. Unfamiliar was used to eliminate the possibility that familiarity with the money was a cause for any differences found, as in previous research (Alter and Oppenheimer 2008). Participants were told that the exchange rate was approximately 1:1 (the real exchange rate is $5 TT to $1 CDN and would result in too little purchasing power for useful estimates) and were instructed that the purchase amounts they estimated should reflect costs in Canada. Participants were also asked how familiar they were with the currency prior to the experiment. Four participants were removed from the analysis because they were previously familiar with the currency. While some of the results are mixed, overall H1 is supported. When all of the estimates are standardized, there is a marginally significant difference between the objects purchasable with bills (1.34 standard deviations above the mean) than with coins (1.39 standard deviations below the mean, p=0.096). Some individual items exhibited significant or marginally significant effects as well, such as paper clips (p=0.046), napkins (p=0.05), and thumbtacks (p=0.073). The lack of strong results in the individual item estimates is likely due to the high variance in the estimates from one participant to another. The exchange valuation prediction is more conclusive: participants given coins estimated they could exchange their $1 TT for $0.798 CDN and those given bills estimated $1.192 (p=0.02), despite being told that both the coins and bills were worth approximately $1 CDN. Study 2 is planned to refine and extend this effect. It is believed that the effects found here would be moderated by the relative value of coins or bills in an individual’s home country. For example, in Canada, coins are used up to the two-dollar denomination and bills are used for denominations of five dollars and larger. This is in contrast to the U.S., where denominations of one dollar or larger are represented by bills, and denominations less than one dollar use coins. A study that includes both Canadians and Americans could find such a difference. Study 2 will be conducted at Niagara Falls, Ontario, and will use nationality as a found condition. Study 3 is an investigation into the physical properties of coins and bills themselves. At the most basic level, coins are metal tokens and bills paper certificates. Would individuals value non-money tokens and certificates the same way? It is expected that they would not; in fact, the opposite valuation is predicted. This is because of the relative weight and permanence of a metal token as opposed to a paper certificate. Furthermore, even real money, when abstracted from its role as money, may have reduced subjective value. As in study 1, it is expected that money coins will be valued less than money bills (demonstrated as the difference between the number of ounces participants drink). The opposite effect is expected for the non-monetary rewards: it is believed that participants receiving non-monetary tokens will drink more than those receiving non-monetary paper certificates. This work provides insight into how individuals value money and implications for research, management, and policy. Policy implications are the most salient here, as it is possible that a shift from bills to coins for a particular denomination (e.g., one dollar in the U.S.) could have an impact on valuation of money overall, as individuals ascribe less purchasing power to the coin than to the bill.

References Alter, Adam L. and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2008), “Easy on the Mind, Easy on the Wallet: The Roles of Familiarity and Processing Fluency in Valuation Judgments,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 15 (5), 985-990. Huttenlocher, Janellen, Larry V. Hedges and Norman M. Bradburn (1990), “Reports of Elapsed Time: Bounding and Rounding Processes in Estimation,” Journal of Experimental : Learning, Memory and Cognition, 16 (March), 196-213. Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky (1973), “On the psychology of prediction,” Psychological Review, 80, 237-251. Mishra, Himanshu, Arul Mishra and Dhananjay Nayakankuppam (2006), “Money: A Bias for the Whole,” Journal of Consumer Research, 32 (March), 541-549. Raghubir, Priya (2006), “An Information Processing Review of the Subjective Value of Money and Prices,” Journal of Business Research, 59, 1053-1062. Raghubir, Priya and Joydeep Srivistava (2009), “The Denomination Effect,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (December), 701-713. Unser, Darrin Lee (2009), “US Dollar Coins Glut, Supply Far Exceeds Demand,” http://www.coinnews.net.

Can Money and Religion Substitute for Each Other? Ezgi Akpinar, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands Kathleen Vohs, University of Minnesota, USA

Money and religion both act as coping aids that people can call upon to make themselves feel strong. A growing stream of research on money has shown that activating the concept of money evokes a state of self-efficacy that implies that each person can and will take care of him/herself (Vohs, Mead, and Goode 2006; Zhou, Vohs, and Baumeister 2009). In parallel, religion too is associated with a feeling of strength or efficacy. When people face threatening, stressful events, religious coping can offset some of the negative consequences of such events (Pargament, Koenig, and Perez 2000). In this research, we investigated to what extent these two sources of strength can substitute each other. Specifically, we tested whether being reminded of money would lessen a need for religious coping, and whether reminders of religion would produce a weakened desire for money. There is a growing research on the psychological effects of money. Money is a distinct entity, which implies that it is attached to a meaning apart from its incentive and functional abilities (Lea and Webley 2006). Empirically, participants reminded of money evince higher personal goal pursuit and reduced dependency on others compared to participants not reminded of money (Vohs et al. 2008). Additionally, money stimulates a general sense of confidence and strength, which therefore helps people to cope with difficulties such as physical pain or social exclusion. Money provides a feeling of confidence that problems can be solved and needs can met (Zhou et al. 2009). Advances in Consumer Research (Volume 38) / 853 Like money, religion is another source of support within the social system. When people are confronted with threatening events, religion offers a sense of mastery and control. Religion can provide internal and external sources for coping stressful life events such as terrorism or the death of an infant child (Kay, Gaucher, McGregor, and Nash 2010; McIntosh, Silver, and Wortman 1993). The commonality between the psychological effects of money and religion suggests that money and religion might be interchangeable, in their ability to help people cope with negative life events. Because money stimulates self-sufficient state, being reminded of it was predicted to reduce participants’ need to cope via religious resources. Because religion also seems to draw out a sense of efficacy, we predicted that mentally activating it would lessen a desire for money. In Study 1, we manipulated the salience of money by having some of the participants count coins and Euro bills and then list their monetary expenditures for the past 30 days. Participants in the neutral condition counted glass beads and listed the weather conditions over the past 30 days. Then, all participants remembered a negative event that had occurred in their life and wrote down the event and their reactions towards it. Thinking on the negative event they had described, participants completed RCOPE scale (Pargament et al. 2000). RCOPE is a scale developed to assess the degree to which various types of religious coping are involved in dealing with negative events. In line with the substitution hypothesis, there was a main effect of money priming on religious coping. Participants who were reminded of money reported being less likely to rely on religious coping compared to participants under neutral conditions. In Study 2, half of the participants were primed with religious concepts using the scrambled-sentence paradigm (Shariff and Norenzayan 2007). The other half completed the scramble task using neutral words. Next, participants were given a list of eleven pleasant things (watching TV, sunshine, spring, chocolate, beach, mobile phone, sport, dancing, Internet, snow, holiday) and asked how willing they would be to forgo those items permanently in exchange for 1 million Euros (Zhou et al. 2009). As predicted, there was a significant effect of religious priming on desire for money. Participants primed with religious concepts were less willing to exchange pleasant things for money. This finding suggests too that money and religion can compensation for each other. Study 3 sought to replicate the effects and to test whether self efficacy mediated the effect of religion on desire for money. Religion- primed participants completed a word-search puzzle that consisted of religious words (Pichon, Boccato, and Saroglou 2007). In control condition, participants completed a word-search puzzle with neutral words. Next, perceived self-efficacy was measured by the General Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer and Jerusalem 1995). Last, desire for money was measured again using the likelihood of exchanging pleasant items in life for 1 million Euros (see study 2). Our results confirmed that religious priming reduces the desire for money, and that this was partially mediated by self efficacy. This research takes a broad look at the interconnectedness of money and religion, two powerful forces in human life. Although there is growing literature on the consequences of reminding people of money, an understanding of religion vis-à-vis other key constructs such as money remains poor. The present studies demonstrate that money and religion can compensate for one another, such that being reminded of money lessens a desire to have the other. What links these two disparate constructs is that they both stimulate a feeling of efficacy, which is elicited by small, subtle reminders. In addition to theoretical value, our results imply exercising caution when using religion to promote products for marketers.

References Lea, Stephen E. G., and Paul Webley (2006), “Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29 (02), 161-209. Kay, Aaron C., Danielle Gaucher, Ian McGregor, and Kyle Nash (2010), “Religious belief as compensatory control,” Personality and Review, 14 (1), 37-48. McIntosh, Daniel N., Roxane C. Silver, and Camille B. Wortman (1993), “Religion’s role in adjustment to a negative life event: Coping with the loss of a child,” Journal of Personality, 65 (4), 812-21. Pargament, Kenneth I., Harold G. Koenig, and Lisa M. Perez (2000), “The many methods of religious coping: Development and initial validation of the RCOPE,” Journal of , 56 (4), 519-43. Pichon, Isabelle, Giulio Boccato, and Vassilis Saroglou (2007), “Nonconscious influences of religion on prosociality: A priming study,” European Journal of Social Psychology, 37 (5), 1032-45. Schwarzer, Ralf, and Jerusalem, Matthias (1995). Generalized Self-Efficacy scale. In Measures in : A user’s portfolio. Causal and control beliefs, ed. J. Weinman, S. Wright, and M. Johnston,Windsor, UK: NFER-NELSON, 35-37. Shariff, Azim F., and Ara Norenzayan (2007), “God is watching you: Priming god concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game,” Psychological Science, 18 (9), 803-9. Vohs, Kathleen D., Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode (2006), “The psychological consequences of money,” Science, 314, 1154- 6. (2008), “Merely activating the concept of money changes personal and interpersonal behavior,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17 (3), 208-12. Zhou, Xinyue, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Roy F. Baumeister (2009), “The symbolic power of money: Reminders of money alter social distress and physical pain,” Psychological Science, 20 (6), 700-6