The Influence Of Money Priming On Helping Behavior Of Undergraduate Students

In the recent years,the increasing crackdown of corruption by the Chinese governm ent has achieved significant results,whilst also prompted hot debate on the topic of"money".On one hand money can satisfy the people’s material needs,whilst on the oth er hand,it exerts a subtle influence on people’s mental wellbeing.Precisely due to this duality,researchers studied the effects of money from the perspectives of both econo mics and psychology.Starting from the 1960’s,the study of the psychological effects of money on people by foreign researchers revealed that money can have both positiv e and negative influences.On the other hand,Chinese researcher Zhou(2009)found th at money can bring self-efficacy,strength and confidence to the people.Money can also satisfy people’s sense of control and high self-esteem(Zhou,Feng,He,&Gao,2008).Money gives people the ability to manipulate social resources,so that one can achieve their goals without outside help.In addition,money can reduce people’s physical and psychological pains.As people compete for the wealth and resources,interpersonal harmony are negatively affected to a certain extent and interpersonal distance between individuals widens.This can block the development positive psychological traits,such as empathy and love.Previous research has shown that individuals under the influence of money priming are less willing to contribute to society,help others,and becomes increasingly cold and distant and selfish.What previous studies did not consider was to differentiate the different categories of empathetic behavior,nor the costs associated with such behaviors.A single standard,generalized study of empathetic behaviors does not match well with reality;Furthermore,many researchers focus on the convenient concept of money priming rather than studying cash priming as a more straight forward form of priming,the difference in the degree of priming is also worth of discussion.Moreover,many studies focuses on the difference between money priming and neutral priming and concludes the effects of money priming,but fails to investigate the difference in effect of varying degrees of money priming.Based on the above summary,this study expands and builds on the scope and methodology of previous studies,and explores the effects of money and material priming on undergraduate students’ empathetic behavior.This study consists of two experiments:experiment one used 2 starting material(money material priming VS.neutral substance priming)x 2 items shape(round VS.square)x 2 difficulty level of helping behavior(simple VS.complex helping behavior)using these three factors to examine the conclusions of previous scholars which is the universality of the money material priming,and carry out preliminary exploration of material money’s impact on college students’ helping behavior.The second experiment builds on the results of the first,using the single factor experiment design between subjects,setting the amount of money as the independent variable,with three levels:namely 1 yuan priming group,10 yuan priming group,and 100 yuan priming group;The dependent variable is choice of behavior,where there are three options:help,leave(neutral),and harm.The aim is to explore the effect of different degrees money priming on undergraduate students’ helping behavior,and in turn provide theoretical basis on the limits of money priming.The experimental conclusions are as follows:(1)Money material priming has obvious effects on undergraduate students’ helping behavior,after priming,general wiliness to help others decreases,selfishness and indifferent attitude increases.(2)Money material priming has significant effects on undergraduate students’simple helping behavior,after priming,college students’ empathetic behaviour falls and will consider their own needs first before considering others,empathy is reduced.But as the difficulty of the helping tasks increase,the effects of money priming decreases.For more complex helping behavior,family environment,up-bring,education,mass media and peer group influence are more dominant factors.(3)Under the condition of same object shape,there wasn’t significant difference between round coin and button,however,there was significant difference between the influence of cash and paper.This shows that paper note has great psychological effects on people’s everyday lives,thus showing the most significant influence on individual behavior.(4)The difference in the amount of money has significant consequence on the effect of money priming.The lower the amount,the less obvious the priming effect and helping behavior reduces whilst harming behavior increases.The reverse is true for higher priming amount,helping behavior increases whilst harming behavior decreases.This shows the positive effects of money priming,the increasing confidence resulting from the abundance of money gave the students more confidence in helping others.