Do people empowered with material resources become less generous?
The role of focus on the self vs. others, materialism and
interdependence
Master thesis
Silviu Horia Tierean
S2043637
Supervisor: Marijke Leliveld
Second reader: Bob Fennis
Faculty of Economics of Business
University of Groningen
2 Abstract
Are people with more money less helpful than those with less money? On one hand, previous research shows that money makes people feel independent and self-sufficient; they also want that others do not depend on them. On the other hand, lacking money increases the costs of altruism, therefore the poor should have a low likelihood of engaging in helping behavior. This study aims to reconcile these conflicting findings by suggesting that the relation between having or lacking money and helping behavior is moderated by the focus on self or on others and, that this pattern does not apply to highly materialistic individuals. Furthermore, interdependence, as self-construal, was found to mediate the relation between material abundance and charity donations, but only for individuals from collectivist cultures.
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Do people empowered with material resources become less generous? The role of focus on self vs. others, materialism and interdependence
The implementation of microcredits (provision of collateral free small loans, mostly focused on women) has been seen not just as a banking movement, but also as a revolution in thinking about poverty reduction and social change (Armendáriz & Morduch, 2010). It seemed like the politics and ideology of microfinance, especially its stress on individual entrepreneurship, self-help and financial responsibility shown by the poor, were exactly what the international development community had been looking for. However, a more recent study of Milford Bateman (2010) posits that in many cases the effects of microfinance programs are undermining and blocking sustainable community development, weakening or destroying community relations, lowering solidarity, mutuality and cooperation. Does empowering the poor with relative material abundance has, in fact, a negative effect on the community, through less helping behavior and generosity? The answer to this question may lie in the fact that the behavior of people with material abundance seems to be guided by a focus on the self’s choices and behaviors, whereas people with scarce resources are driven by focus on others’ choices and behaviors (Piff, Kraus, Cote, Cheng & Keltner, 2010; Vohs, Mead and Goode, 2006).
By proposing two conceptual models, in the present report we argue that a sense of wealth can actually hurt helping behavior, under specific conditions. In the first conceptual model, we suggest that people with money will be more generous when focused on the self’s choices than on others’ choices. Conversely, People with few material resources will be more generous when focused on others than when focused on themselves. Furthermore, we argue that individuals’ level of materialism influences this pattern, in the sense that highly materialistic people are less generous in general, regardless of their wealth or focus. In the
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second conceptual model, we propose that interdependence mediates the influence of having money or not and charity donations. We argue that regardless of the focus on self’s or others’ choices and behaviors, money makes people less interdependent as self construal, and that interdependence is negatively related to charity donations. However, interdependence has this mediating effect only for people from collectivist cultures. In the microfinance context, this may explain why the negative outcomes of implementing microfinance programs appear only for some communities, but not for other.
The following section reviews literature on the psychological consequences of money, the role of focus on the self vs. others, materialism and interdependence, in relation to helping behavior, in general, and more specifically on charity donations. Next, the study design, procedure and results are reported, whereas the final section will discuss the conclusions, limitations and future research.
Psychological effects of money. The influence of money on charity donations.
The primary effect of the concept of money, and more broadly of material, is to promote general feelings of strength. The mere idea of money has considerable psychological consequences, enough to alter reactions to social exclusion and even to physical pain. Zhou, Vohs and Baumeister (2009) show that thinking about money interacted with social and physical adversity to alter participants’ subjective experience. They found that both social rejection and thoughts of physical pain leads to increased desire for money, and that counting money reduces the suffering induced by ostracism and real physical pain. Therefore, money operates as a resource that confers a broad, strong feeling of being able to cope with problems and satisfy one’s needs. Secondly, having more money is associated with more frequent positive emotions and less frequent negative emotions (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2006). Thirdly, money is positively related to personal health, lack of
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financial strain decreases mortality (Adler & Snibbe, 2003), lowers depression and health problems in general and increases feelings of control (Price, Choi, & Vinokur, 2002). Fourthly, having money protects people from unfortunate and unforeseen perturbations of life, (Johnson & Krueger, 2006). Consequently, it may be true that at individual level, having money brings benefits to people’s lives. In addition to the positive effects at a personal level, material abundance is also good for the society as a whole.
Research has documented that having money can result in more donation behavior. A longitudinal study by Schervish and Havens (2001) has found that the wealthiest 7% of U.S. households contribute over 50% of the money to charitable causes. Additionally, experimental research demonstrated the existence of a "noblesse oblige", a social norm within high socio-economic status individuals that prompts them to behave prosocially (Fiddick & Cummins, 2007). Moreover, people who lack material resources must sometimes protect their possessions and consequently behave less prosocially than others (Drentea, 2000; Oakes & Rossi, 2003). Directing resources away from the self toward others is costly. As the costs of prosocial behavior rise, the likelihood and magnitude of prosocial behavior diminishes (Piff, Kraus, Cote, Cheng & Keltner, 2010). This suggests that the costs of any altruistic act should be greater for lower class individuals and reduce the likelihood of prosocial action. Furthermore, the sense of control that accompanies wealthy individuals (Price et al., 2002) also predicts increased compassion and prosocial behavior. An elevated sense of control allows individuals to regulate the distress associated with perceiving need in others and to engage in effective prosocial behavior. Because lower class individuals have been found to experience a reduced sense of control and self-efficacy (Piff et al., 2010), it is probable that their reduced sense of control and efficacy diminish their prosocial behavior.
In light of such evidence, one might argue that it is a foregone conclusion that people with money are more helpful. Confusingly, there are supportive findings also for the opposite
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reasoning.Households with incomes greater than $100,000 donate a lower proportion of their incomes than those with less than $25,000 (Gardyn, 2003). Moreover, in their series of studies published in 2006, Vohs, Mead and Goode found that reminders of money decrease people’s helpfulness, due to its negative effect on interpersonal relationships. In their studies, Vohs, Mead and Goode activated the concept of money by using priming techniques. Their results showed that participants who had been strongly reminded of money were less helpful than both participants who had been weakly reminded of money or have not been reminded of money at all. When the construct of money was activated, participants showed reduced helpfulness toward others, preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance. However the behavior of participants primed with money was not exclusively undesirable, as they showed more persistence on challenging tasks and taking on more work for oneself (individual performance efforts). Thus, money does not necessarily make people selfish, it makes them “self-sufficient” and behave accordingly. Vohs and colleagues (2006) introduced the concept of self-sufficiency describing it as an emphasis on behaviors of one’s own choosing accomplished without active involvement from others. People who value self-sufficiency do not allow others to involve the self in their activities and are less helpful because they expect everyone to take care of themselves. In line with the self-sufficiency hypothesis, people who highly value money have poorer relationships than do those who have a more moderate appreciation for money (Kasser & Ryan, 1993). Moreover, upper class individuals are more insensitive to others’ needs and are less prosocial than lower class individuals, despite their high resource availability and less threatening environments, (Piff et al., 2010). In addition, it has been shown that family relationships and the possession of material objects are opposing values, therefore, pursuing both harms people’s mental health and causes mental stress (Burroughs & Rindfleisch, 2002).
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The scientific literature provides two conflicting findings of the influence of money on prosocial behavior. In the present research, we aim to reconcile this discrepancy by suggesting that the relation between having or lacking material resources and charity donations depends on the focus on the self vs. others and materialism.
Focus on the self vs. others as a moderator of the relation between money and generosity
Relative to their upper class counterparts, lower class individuals have fewer economic resources (Drentea, 2000), fewer educational opportunities, less access to social institutions such as elite schools, universities, and social clubs (Oakes & Rossi, 2003); they have a subordinate rank in society relative to others and more violence in their homes (Staggs, Long, Mason, Krishnan, & Riger, 2007). Facing these circumstances, lower class individuals might be expected to be more focused on their own well-being, prioritizing their own needs over the needs of others. Despite experiencing life stressors on a more chronic basis, lower class individuals appear to be more engaged with the needs of others (Piff et al., 2010). Furthermore, research has suggested that people often perceive choices for others as being as important as choices for the self (Laran 2010). However, the self-sufficient state elicited by the idea of money or resources appears to undermine the importance of choices for others. Moreover, as money reminders make personal freedom and autonomy more important and attractive, people primed with money would become more autonomous reluctant to social influence attempts that can potentially limit their freedom and self-sufficiency (Liu et al. 2012).
In conclusion, there seems to be a congruency between having vs. lacking money and focus on self vs. on others. The behavior of people with abundant material resources is guided by a focus on the self, in contrast the behavior of people lacking resources, who appear to be
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driven by a focus on others. People who have money would be more self-sufficient when focused on themselves then when focused on others.
In the present study, we hypothesize that when choosing to donate to charitable organization or not, individuals primed with resource abundance would donate less when reminded of others and more when reminded of the self, because in a mindset of having resources, choices for the self are more important. Conversely, when in a mindset of lacking resources, people reminded of others would be more helpful than those reminded of the self.
The role of materialism
Possessions symbolize achievement and success, which in turn generate social recognition and status, and possessions make people feel distinctive from others, and self-important (Atay & Sirgy, 2007; Banerjee & Dittmar, 2008). Materialism reflects the importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions. At the highest levels of materialism, such possessions assume a central place in a person's life and are believed to provide the greatest sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in life (Belk, 1984). Materialistic people think that the acquisition of material goods is not only a central life goal but also a key to self-definition and happiness. Materialism has, however, harmful effects, as it inhibits positive social relations (Banerjee et al., 2008). Moreover, materialism has been associated with peer rejection, psychosocial problems such as compulsive buying, a tendency to overspend, and antisocial behavior (Ku, Dittmar, & Banerjee, 2011). Nongenerosity has been identified as one of the main components of materialism (Belk, 1984). In the context of materialism, nongenerosity involves an unwillingness to give or share possessions with others; nongenerosity is motivated by an egoistic concern for self over others.
In line with these findings, we expect that materialism is negatively correlated with charity donations and that materialism moderates the effect of focus (on self vs. others) on the
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relation between resource abundance (high vs. low) on charity donations (three way interaction between resource abundance, focus and materialism).
Fig 1. First conceptual framework
The role of interdependence (as self-construal) in the relation between resource abundance and generosity
People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of the two (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the nature of individual experiences. People with an independent self-construal define themselves in terms of internal attributes such as traits, abilities, values, and preferences, while people with an interdependent self-construal define themselves in terms of their relationships with others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). People with an independent self construal neither assume nor like such an overt connectedness among individuals; individuals seek to maintain their independence from others by attending to the self and by discovering and expressing their unique inner attributes. In contrast, experiencing interdependence entails seeing oneself as part of an encompassing social relationship and recognizing that one's behavior is determined, contingent on, and, to a large extent organized by what the actor perceives to be the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others in the relationship (Markus & Kitayama 1991). Interdependent people are motivated to find a way to fit in with relevant others, to fulfill and create obligation, and in general to become part of various interpersonal relationships. Hence, people may actively work to fulfill the
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others' goals while passively monitoring the reciprocal contributions from these others for one's own goal fulfillment (Markus & Kitayama 1991).
Poor people are more dependent on others to achieve their desired life outcomes, more aware of others in their social environment, and more likely to display other-oriented nonverbal behaviors (Piff et al., 2010). These findings suggest that individuals with less material resources act in a more prosocial fashion because of an increased orientation towards the needs of others. Poor people’s increased attention to the social context implies a high willingness to be socially connected with others. Whereas individuals with more material resources are characterized by freedoms of personal choice, lower class individuals experience depend on others to achieve desired outcomes (Piff et al., 2010). As a result, poor individuals seem to be motivated to behave in ways that increases social engagement and connection with others. For example, whereas upper class individuals demonstrate greater impoliteness in interactions with strangers (e.g., in such behaviors as self-grooming, fidgeting with objects, or doodling on their questionnaire, all of which reflect less attention directed to the interaction partner), lower class individuals’ nonverbal style involves more socially engaged eye contact, head nods, eyebrow raises, and laughs (Kraus & Keltner, 2009). Moreover, in observational studies (Scherer, 1974; Stipek & Ryan, 1997), lower class children played in closer proximity to other children, and were more likely to smile relative to their upper class counterparts.
These findings are supported by the studies where people reminded of money are less sensitive to the needs of others than they would be without that reminder (Vohs et al., 2008). Individuals with fewer resources, relative to those with high resource availability, seem to be more attuned to the social context and invested in their interactions with others; they have an increased dependence on others and are oriented towards others’ needs. Relative to wealthy individuals, poor individuals construe themselves more in terms of their relationships to
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others, relying on each other to get what they need. Acts of generosity and benevolence among lower class people are a means to build relationships and strengthen social bonds (Piff et al., 2010). This social interdependence suggests a strong need to belong, because being accepted by the group is vital for obtaining the means of survival (Zhou et al., 2009). However, money can substitute social popularity; money enables people to manipulate the social system to give them what they want, regardless of whether they are liked or not (Lea & Webley, 2006). Therefore, it should be either money or interpersonal inclusion that enables people to obtain what they want. Money provides a feeling of confidence that problems can be solved and needs can be met, and such confidence, leads people to care less about others’ approval. Thus, money may be a social resource with which one can manipulate the social system for personal benefit. Consequently, people reminded of money appear uninterested in forming friendships (Mead, Baumeister, Caruso & Vohs., 2011, as cited in Liu et al. 2012), and they are unaffected by social exclusion (Zhou et al. 2009). In contrast, thoughts of losing money increase the pain of rejection: thinking about having spent money increases the negative impact of social exclusion. In conclusion, people who lack money are more dependent on people from their community. These communal orientations may predispose them toward prosocial behavior even when they do not expect others to be immediately prosocial in return. Conversely, wealthy people would be less dependent on their community members, and, consequently they would not see any benefits in behaving generously.
The role of culture. Individualism vs collectivism
According to Hofstede (2001), people in individualistic cultures are independent, rely on their own effort to survive and care only for themselves and their close kin. People in collectivistic cultures are more interdependent, prefer team work and value their group membership more than personal success (Hofstede, 2001). Both theoretical and empirical
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evidence links the independent vs. interdependent self construals at individual level with the cultural dimension individualism vs. collectivism (Singelis, 2004; Fernández, Paez & González 2005). In cultures where an important proportion of the population lacks material resources, it is expected individuals are more interdependent, and the culture as a whole more collectivistic. At nation (culture) level “richer” countries are more individualistic; there is a significant effect of the Gross Domestic Product per capita on the individualism measure of a culture (Cox et al., 2011). By implication, the level of individual wealth could have an effect on the cultural dimensions. Cheng and colleagues (2011) posits that East Asian countries have undergone drastic transformation from subsistence- to industrial-based societies. The rapid economic growth in these collectivistic countries is reflected by an escalation of the annual percentage change of gross domestic product the GDP per capita. The process of societal modernization involves not only economic but also social changes such as increase in educational levels, rising importance of personal achievement, changes in gender role, and fragmentation of traditional extended families into nuclear ones (Cheng et al. 2011). Such social changes seem to have an impact on these collectivistic societies by reducing indigenous values while simultaneously the creation of new ones, which are more individualistic in nature. Previously interdependent individuals may show an increase in needs for autonomy and a concomitant decline in needs for deference and nurturance. High resource availability leads to greater individualistic orientation and stronger desire for autonomous social participation, but only within traditionally collectivistic cultures (Cheng et al., 2011).
We expect that priming individuals with resource abundance (vs. scarcity) would lead to a lower interdependence (as self construal), but this effect would be present only in the case of individuals living in collectivist (vs. individualist) cultures. Furthermore, we expect a negative relation between interdependence of the individuals and charity donations. Thus, interdependence is expected to mediate the relation between resource abundance and charity
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donations. However since the relation between resource abundance and interdependence is expected to be moderated by culture (individualist vs. collectivist), we witness a first stage moderated mediation model. The two cultures analyzed in our study are Dutch and Romanian. According to Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2005), the Dutch are highly individualist scoring 80 on the Individualism scale, while the Romanians form a collectivistic society, scoring 30 on the Individualism scale. Hence, we argue that reminding people of material abundance would lead to a lower interdependence only for Romanians, but not also for the Dutch.
Fig 2. Second conceptual framework
Method
In order to test the hypotheses, participants were randomly assigned to a 2 (resource abundance vs. resource scarcity) x 2 (focus on self’s behavior vs. focus on others’ behavior) between subjects experimental design. A total of 230 students at University of Groningen, the Netherlands (184) and Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania (46) participated in the study (101 female and 129 male, Mean age = 21.4, SD = 3.67). The nationalities of the students at the Dutch university were as follows: 127 Dutch, 31 Chinese, 14 Germans, 4 Bulgarians, 4 Indonesian and on of each Polish, Norwegian, Latvian and French. The participants from the Romanian university were all Romanian. At the end of the experiment, participants were debriefed.
+
–
14 Procedure
For the students at the Dutch university, the data was collect within the lab. Their participation was rewarded (€4 or course credit). Upon their arrival at the research laboratory, participants read and signed an informed consent form. The participants were told that the main goal of this research is to gain more insight into the way consumers live their lives, how they see things and what choices they make. Afterwards they were seated in individual cubicles, where they filled in a paper questionnaire (in English). For the students at the Romanian university, the data was collected online via the Qualtrics software. E-mail messages were sent to students’ addresses asking them to fill in the online questionnaire (in Romanian). Both questionnaires (paper and online) begin with a paragraph that instructs the participant that collected data will be used in standardizing a text and a set of three tasks, and statistically calibrating a series of different scales, for future unrelated studies, that will analyze employees’ psychological traits and their attitudes towards society.
Manipulations and measures
Resource abundance vs. resource scarcity (money condition). Participants were
instructed to read a paragraph and will be asked some questions concerning the communication style used. The participants were asked to take the perspective of the individual in the text and imagine the story as if they were that person, looking at the world through his/her eyes and walking through the world in his/her shoes. The high vs. low resources prime consisted in two texts adapted from Vohs et al. (2006, experiment 2). The participants primed with resource abundance read “I come from a very affluent family, so I have never had to worry about money […] I grew up in a really nice, big house […] I don’t have to worry about money […] money is not my central concern”. Participants reminded of material scarcity read “I come from a family that doesn’t have much money […] we didn’t
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have any extra money for excess expenditures […] money is always in the back of my mind” (full texts are available in the Appendix section). After reading one of the two texts, the participants were asked to indicate if the person described lives in a rich, abundant environment or in a poor, scarce environment. This question served as a manipulation check for the high vs. low resources experimental conditions. In order to focus their attention on reading the text, the participants were asked to indicate whether the communication style used was (1) direct or indirect and (2) passive or assertive. However, the answers to these questions was not taken into account in the analyses.
Focus on the self vs. others (focus condidtion). For the focus on the self vs. others
prime an adaptation from Whitson and Galinski (2008) was used. In the focus on the self condition participants were asked three questions about their thoughts and feelings in a situation where they showed generosity: “Please describe, in a few sentences, a situation out of your own life in which you behaved generous and altruistically toward someone or some organization which requested help”, “Please describe, in a few sentences, how you behaved in this situation in which you showed generosity and altruism” and “Please describe, in a few sentences, the emotions that you experienced in this situation where you behaved generous and altruistically”. In the focus on others condition similar questions are asked with a different actor: “Please describe, in a few sentences, a situation that you encountered in which someone else (for example a classmate, a friend or a family member) behaved generous and altruistically toward someone or some organization which requested help”, “Please describe, in a few sentences, how he/she behaved in this situation” and “Please describe, in a few sentences, the emotions that you experienced in this situation where he/she behaved generous and altruistically”. After being requested to answer the three questions, the participants were asked to indicate who behaved generously in the situations described by them. This question served as a manipulation check for the focus on the self vs. others experimental conditions.
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Interdependence. Interdependence (as self construal) was measured (α = .726) using
the 12 items scale proposed by Singelis (1994). The original items of both the interdependence and materialism scales are framed as a trait and therefore formulated as being independent of any situation. In order to amplify the effect of the manipulations, we made a slight alteration by asking the participants “to what extent the statements below are reflective of how you feel right now?” and by adding “Right now I feel that…” as a table head, followed by the items (e.g. "…I have respect for the authority figures with whom I interact”). The answers for both interdependence and materialism were given on 7 point Likert scales ranging from 1 (I strongly disagree) to 7 (I strongly agree).
Materialism. Materialistic orientation was measured using the 8 items of the
Materialistic Orientation Scale (Goldberg, Gorn, Peracchio, & Bamossi, 2003, e.g. “…the more money you have, the happier you are”, α = .777).
Donations to charity. Participants were asked to read the following text: “I am using
this occasion to inform you that the Groningen Student Fund needs your help! The Groningen Student Fund, which provides students in need with money to purchase food, books, and any other related living costs, is currently looking for volunteers to help in raising money and other activities. Please indicate in the box below how much time are you willing to dedicate to our cause. If you would like to participate, great, if not don’t worry about it. It’s completely up to you.” Therefore, the main dependent variable of our study was measured by asking the participants to write in a box the number of hours of help in raising money and other activities.
Socio-demographic variables. Lastly, participants completed several demographic
17 Results
Out of 230 the total of participants, 25 (17 students at the Dutch university and 8 students at the Romanian university) failed at least one of the manipulation checks (10.8%). 8 students failed to correctly report the main idea of the text used in the money manipulation while another 17 students failed the focus condition manipulation check. The participants who failed at least one of the manipulation checks were eliminated from further analysis. The analyzed sample contains 167 students at the Dutch university (66 females and 101 males, Mean age = 20.7, SD = 2.26) and 38 students at the Romanian university (13 females and 15 males, Mean age = 24.0, SD = 6.71). The number of cases per experimental condition (see Table 1), indicate that participants in the material scarcity with a focus on others condition had the most difficulties passing the manipulation checks.
Table 1. Distribution of analyzed participants in the four experimental conditions Focus on Total Self Others Material abundance Count 58 56 114 % of Total 28.3 27.3 55.6 Material scarcity Count 46 45 91
% of Total 22.4 22.0 44.4
Total Count 104 101 205
% of Total 50.7 49.3 100.0
A full factorial ANOVA with the material abundance vs. scarcity and focus on self vs. others as predictors, on donation behavior yielded the expected interaction between conditions, F (1, 201) = 5.544, p < .025, η2 = .27. The main effects of abundance vs. scarcity condition (F (1, 201) = 0.2) and focus conditions (F (1, 201) = 0.69) were not significant.
Simple main effect analyses indicated that participants primed with the idea of having less resources donated more time to charity when reminded of others’ behavior (focus on others condition, M = 4.69, SD = 1.13) than when reminded of their own behavior (focus on
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the self condition, M = 1.35, SD = 1.12), F (1,89) = 4.44, p < .05, η2 = .047; Figure 3. Among participants primed with material abundance, the pattern reversed. The expectation was that the participants in the focus on the self condition (M = 4.29, SD = .97) donated more of their time then participants in the focus on others condition (M = 2.68, SD = .99). Although, a trend exists, the differences between the two conditions is not statistically significant at the 5% significance level, F (1,112) = 1.35, η2 = .012.
Figure 3. Donations (in number of hours) as a function of material abundance vs. scarcity and focus condition. Comparison between money conditions
Testing the differences within the focus conditions, participants reminded of their own behavior primed with material abundance donated significantly more (M = 4.29, SD = .90) than participants primed with material scarcity (M = 1.35, SD = 1.01), F (1,102) = 4.71, p < .05, η2 = .044; Figure 4. Conversely, when the focus on others was primed, it seemed the participants who had been primed with resource scarcity who were more generous toward the charitable cause (M = 4.69, SD = 1.20) than their counterparts primed with material abundance (M = 2.68, SD = 1.08). However, the differences are not significant, F (1,99) = 1.55, η2 = .015. 0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5
Material scarcity Material abundance
Focus on self Focus on others
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Figure 4. Donations (in number of hours) as a function of material abundance vs. scarcity and focus condition. Comparison between focus conditions
In order to assess the moderating role of materialism, a regression analysis has been conducted, with money condition (high vs. low resources), focus condition (self vs. others), materialism and all 2-way interactions and the 3 way interaction included (Table 2). The money condition was coded -1 for material scarcity and 1 for abundance, while the focus condition was coded -1 for focus on self and 1 for focus on others.
Table 2. Regression model estimates
B Standard error t p Constant 6.2 2.38 2.61 0.01 Focus 1.49 2.38 0.63 0.53 Money -2.11 2.38 -0.89 0.38 Focus*Money -6.47 2.38 -2.72 0.01 Materialism -0.7 0.54 -1.3 0.2 Money*Materialism 0.56 0.54 1.03 0.31 Focus*Materialism -0.26 0.54 -0.47 0.64 Money*Focus*Materialism 1.23 0.54 2.28 0.02
The effect of the interaction between focus condition and money condition is significant, as expected, p < .01. Also the effect of the three-way interaction is significant, which proves the hypothesized moderating role of materialism. The degree of materialism moderates the effect of focus (self vs. others) on the relation between resource abundance
0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5
Focus on self Focus on others
Material scarcity Material abundance
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(high vs low) on charity donations. The R Square increase due to the inclusion of the three-way interaction term is significant, F (1,197) = 5.19, p < .025. The conditional effects (Hayes, 2012, model 3) of the interaction between money condition and focus condition (Money*Focus) differ depending on the level of materialism. The focus (self vs. others) moderates the relation between the money condition and donation behavior only when the degree of materialism is low or moderate (Table 3). Highly materialistic participants react to neither of the two manipulations, nor to the interaction between them. In fact highly materialistic participants donate very little, as shown by the negative correlation between materialism and donations (r = -.13, p < 0.65).
Table 3. Conditional effect of Focus*Money at different levels of materialism Materialism Effect Standard error t p
Low -2.4 0.74 -3.23 0.0015 Moderate -1.19 0.52 -2.3 0.0225 High 0.01 0.74 0.01 0.9915
In assessing the relations between the variables in the second conceptual framework, only Dutch and Romanian participants were selected for analysis (N=152, 114 Dutch and 38 Romanians). A full factorial ANOVA with the material abundance vs. scarcity and nationality as predictors, on interdependence yielded the expected interaction between money condition and nationality, F (1,148) = 4.69, p < .05. As expected, the main effect of nationality (F (1,148) = 10.64, p < .002) was significant. Consistent with the theory associating collectivist cultures to high interdependence and individualistic cultures to low interdependence (Singelis, 2004; Fernández, Paez & González 2005), Romanians (M = 4.97, SD = 0.97) were significantly (F (1,150 = 7.53, p < 0.01) more interdependent than the Dutch (M = 4.6, SD = 0.64).
In support of our hypotheses that resource abundance leads to lower interdependence only for collectivistic cultures, simple main effect analyses indicated that Dutch students
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primed with the idea of having more resources did not record lower interdependence (M = 4.59, SD = .089) than did Dutch students primed with the idea of having less resources (M = 4.60, SD = .083), F (1,112) = 0.21, Figure 5. Among Romanians, the students in the abundant resources condition (M = 4.76, SD = 1.91) recorded a lower interdependence in comparison to Romanians in the scarce resources condition (M = 5.34, SD = 1.25), F (1,37) = 3.5, p < .07. The statistical significance only at the 10% significance level should be a consequence of the small size of the Romanian subsample (38).
Figure 5. Feelings of interdependence (on a scale between 1 and 7) as a function of material abundance vs. scarcity and culture
To test the moderated mediation relationship suggested by the second conceptual model, we followed the steps provided by Hayes (2012). This approach involves formal significance tests of the indirect relationship between the predictor and the outcome variable, as transmitted by the mediating variable, at different values of the moderator. In other words, we evaluated the statistical significance of the conditional indirect relationship between an money condition and charity donations, as transmitted by interdependence, for the two different cultures in our analysis (Dutch and Romanian). Traditional approaches to test the
4,5 4,6 4,7 4,8 4,9 5 5,1 5,2 5,3 5,4 5,5 Dutch Romanians Material scarcity Material abundance
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significance of a (conditional) indirect relation (e.g., Sobel, 1982) rest on the assumption that the indirect relationship is normally distributed. This assumption is tenuous, however, because the sampling distribution of an indirect relation is known to be nonnormal, even when its elements (i.e., the direct linkages between predictor and mediator, on the one hand, and mediator and outcome, on the other) are normally distributed (Preacher & Hayes, 2004). Bootstrap procedures do not make assumptions about the shape of the sampling distribution of the indirect relation, thus producing more robust results (Preacher et al., 2007).
The bootstrapping methods (bootstrap samples for bias corrected bootstrap confidence intervals = 1000) were used to test the indirect effect of interdependence on the relationship between money (material scarcity vs. abundance) and the amount of charity donations, under specific conditions of the culture (individualist vs. collectivist) moderator (Hayes, 2012; model 7). In the first equation, money condition and culture were entered together and their interaction predicts team performance B=-.336, SE=.0155, t=-2.17, p < .05. In the second equation, with interdependence and money condition as predictors and charity donations as the dependent variable, the effect of interdependence was significant, B=3.04, SE=.8433, t=3.61, p < .001. However, in the same equation, the effect of money condition on charity donations was not significant, B=.203, SE=.64, t=.319. Further testing of the conditional indirect effects revealed that interdependence mediates the relation between money condition and charity donations, only in the case of Romanian participants, B = -.89, Boot SE=.56, 95% bootstrap CI = -2.51 to -.13. By contrast, the mediation pattern does not hold for Dutch participants, B =.26, Boot SE=.20, 95% bootstrap CI = -.38 to .52.
23 Discussion
Our aim was to investigate whether material abundance or scarcity influences charity donations, and under which conditions. By proposing two conceptual models, we predicted that people with money will be more generous when focused on the self’s choices than on others’ choices and that people with few material resources will be more generous when focused on others than when focused on themselves. Furthermore, we suggested that individuals’ level of materialism influences this pattern, in the sense that highly materialistic people are less generous in general, regardless of their wealth or focus. In addition, we predicted that interdependence mediates the influence of having money or not and charity donations. We proposed that money makes people less interdependent as self-construal, and that interdependence is negatively related to charity donations. However, interdependence has this mediating effect only for people from collectivist cultures.
In the present study we experimentally manipulated money (abundance vs. scarcity) and focus (on self vs. on others) to reveal that the relation between individual wealth and charity donations is not as straight forward as previously thought. The results of our study support our hypotheses. The analyses yielded the expected interaction effect between money and focus conditions on charity donations. Furthermore, as expected, the effects of the interaction between money condition and focus condition differ depending on the level of materialism. The focus (self vs. others) moderates the relation between the money condition and donation behavior only when the degree of materialism is low or moderate. As highly materialistic individuals donated very little, they were influenced by neither of the two manipulations, nor to the interaction between them. In support of our hypotheses that resource abundance leads to lower interdependence only for collectivistic cultures, our results yielded the expected interaction between money condition and culture. Highly individualist Dutch participants primed with the idea of having more resources did not record lower
24
interdependence than did Dutch students primed with the idea of having fewer resources. In contract, among Romanians, the participants in the abundant resources condition are less interdependent in comparison to Romanians in the scarce resources condition. Furthermore, we have shown that interdependence mediates the relationship between resource abundance and charity donation, but only for collectivistic individuals (i.e Romanians).
The effects of money on human behavior have been intensely debated. Are people with more money less helpful than those with less money? This question has been central to longstanding discussions about the responsibilities of the wealthy. Recent empirical studies and theoretical arguments yield mixed results. On one hand, the expectation could be that poor people, dependent on others, should see more benefits in behaving more prosocial. On the other hand, people with very limited financial resources experience higher costs in being helpful and generous, hence they should be inclined to be less prosocial (Piff et al., 2010). Our research fills research this gap in the scientific literature, by reconciling the conflicting findings regarding the helping behavior of people with money versus without money by suggesting that the relation between having or lacking money and helping behavior is moderated by the self vs. others focus, and that the moderating effect of self vs. others focus does not exist for highly materialistic individuals. Our results show that empowering the poor with relative material abundance has a negative effect on the community, through less helping behavior and generosity, but only when the individuals’ focus is on others (versus self) and at low or moderate levels of materialism. By implication, we show that people benefiting from material abundance who are more self-focused will be more helpful and generous towards their community then those focused on others, but not when materialism is at high levels.
As countries and cultures developed, money may have allowed people to acquire goods and services that enabled the pursuit of cherished goals, which in tum diminished reliance on friends and family. In this way, money enhanced individualism but diminished
25
communal motivations, an effect that is still apparent in people's responses to money today (Vohs et al., 2006). The current research also establishes a link between wealth and the way people construe themselves interdependently of others. The implications are that merely activating the thoughts of material abundance reduces interdependence, but only people with high interdependence. Is it possible that this a dynamic, ongoing process? Do people change their self-construal according to their material possessions? Our results suggest that this process might be a dynamic one and that, while people currently living in collectivistic societies may become less interdependent as they become wealthier.
Limitations and future research
Our research has some important limitations. As mentioned above, our study provides the first evidence of a causal relation between material abundance, focus, materialism and charity donations. However, materialism was simply recorded. In order to provide genuine causal evidence for the hypothesized relations, future research should experimentally manipulate materialism, preferably using a 2 x 2 x 2 experimental design. Further limitations arise from the data collection procedure. Dutch participants were filled in questionnaires in a laboratory setting whereas Romanian participants filled in an online questionnaire. This could have led to a self-selection bias within the Romanian subsample. Beside this, the Romanians did not receive any incentives for participating (study credit or money), which could be a problem in the context of our study, as one manipulation involved material abundance vs. scarcity. Moreover, in assessing the moderating role of individualism, only two cultures were analyzed. Future research could address this shortcoming by including more cultures and, consequently treating individualism as a continuous variable.
26 Conclusion
Taken together, the findings of the present study provide an answer to the debate whether the wealthy or the poor are more generous. Our study is the first to provide evidence that the relation between money and charity donations is moderated by focus on the self vs. others, and that this pattern does not apply in the case of highly materialistic people. Furthermore, in a multicultural setting, our study links wealth to how individuals construe themselves interdependently, and establishes a relation between people’s feeling of interdependence and generosity.
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32 Appendix
Resource abundance condition:
“I come from a very affluent family, so I have never had to worry about money. I grew up in a really nice, big house, with a nanny and a couple of servants. My parents never spoke about money with me because they dealt with all the financial matters. I have never really had to think about money much. I know that since my family has money, I have been provided with more opportunities than the average person. I am a very fortunate person, I have had the chance to travel to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia several times each, and I usually spend my summers abroad. I can also participate in activities that I am interested in, such as sailing, horseback riding, and skiing, rather than ones that I have to go into. I also have had the opportunity to attend many diverse cultural events all over the world. I had my first job when I decided to start working part time in my second year of University and obtained a job that I really enjoy. I work because I enjoy it, rather than because I need the money. It’s really nice that I don’t have to worry about money much. I feel really comfortable and secure about my future knowing that money is not my central concern.”
Resource scarcity condition:
“I come from a family that doesn’t have much money. I grew up in a modest home, though it was small enough that I had to share a bedroom with one of my siblings. My family gets by okay usually, but occasionally there are times when my parents are pretty worried about making ends meet. Because of our financial situation, my opportunities have been rather limited. I haven’t really had the chance to travel anywhere, because we didn’t have any extra money for excess expenditures, and I haven’t been able to go to many cultural events. We always made the most of the money we had though, and once in a while we would go out for dinner to treat ourselves. I have always had to be pretty responsible and mature for my age,
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like when I was really young I had to get a job to help the family out. I didn’t like the job particularly, but it helped pay the bills. Since it is so expensive to attend university, I am always on the look out for a better paying job. I try not to worry too much about money, but it is pretty difficult sometimes and money is always in the back of my mind. I feel really worried and apprehensive about my future when I start thinking about money”
