Trzcińska Agata, Sekścińska Katarzyna
Faculty of Psychology, University of WarsawWarsaw, Poland; Institute for Social Sciences, University of WarsawWarsaw, Poland.
Front Psychol. 2016 Apr 27;7:609. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00609. eCollection 2016.
The psychological model of thinking about money assumes that implicit reminders of money lead to self-sufficient motivation. Previous research has demonstrated that children react to money in similar ways to adults. The priming of young children with money related concepts or images has negatively affected their social behavior and social preferences, leading them to make more individualist and less pro-social choices and be less willing to help others. The aim of this research was to investigate the positive influence of money activation on children's behavior. The participants were 6-8 year old children who do not yet fully understand the instrumental function of money due to their young age. Two experimental studies were performed, the first of which analyzed the effect of perseverance and performance on a challenging task and the second investigated preferences with respect to delaying gratification. Sixty-one children aged 6 took part in the first study and forty-six scout camp participants 6-8 years of age were involved in the second experiment. The results support the hypotheses concerning the effects of money activation stating that (1) money activation influences children's perseverance and effectiveness in difficult individual tasks, and that (2) it increases children's preferences for delayed gratification. These results suggest that money has a symbolic power which may exert both positive and negative effects on children's behavior. Since children between the ages of 6 and 8 do not understand the instrumental function of money fully, certain symbolic meanings of money may have been responsible for the money priming effects. The findings suggest that the symbolic function of money is more primal than its instrumental function and that it probably develops at an earlier stage in life.
关于金钱思考的心理学模型假定，金钱的隐性提示会引发自给自足的动机。先前的研究表明，儿童对金钱的反应与成年人相似。用与金钱相关的概念或图像对幼儿进行启动，会对他们的社会行为和社会偏好产生负面影响，导致他们做出更具个人主义色彩、亲社会程度更低的选择，并且更不愿意帮助他人。本研究的目的是调查金钱启动对儿童行为的积极影响。参与者是6至8岁的儿童，由于年龄较小，他们尚未完全理解金钱的工具性功能。进行了两项实验研究，第一项分析了毅力和表现对一项具有挑战性任务的影响，第二项调查了关于延迟满足的偏好。61名6岁儿童参与了第一项研究，46名6至8岁的童子军营地参与者参与了第二项实验。结果支持了关于金钱启动影响的假设，即(1)金钱启动会影响儿童在困难的个人任务中的毅力和效率，(2)它会增加儿童对延迟满足的偏好。这些结果表明，金钱具有象征力量，可能会对儿童行为产生积极和消极的影响。由于6至8岁的儿童尚未完全理解金钱的工具性功能，金钱的某些象征意义可能是造成金钱启动效应的原因。研究结果表明，金钱的象征功能比其工具功能更为原始，而且它可能在生命的更早阶段就已形成。
