Does being reminded of money make people prefer doing things alone?

Details

The original report described nine experiments. Compared with nonmoney reminders, money reminders led participants to request less help and be less helpful to others. Compared with neutral reminders, they also preferred playing and working alone and kept more physical distance from a new acquaintance. The authors suggested that money reminders encourage people to avoid both depending on others and having others depend on them.

A separate research team repeated the first experiment twice, using studies designed to have a strong chance of detecting an effect if it existed. This experiment tested how long participants persisted with a puzzle, rather than their preference for solo activities. In the original experiment, participants reminded of money reportedly worked for nearly twice as long as controls before quitting. Neither replication found evidence of the money-reminder effect.

The replication researchers also reported that 25% of their participants produced a puzzle solution, whether correct or incorrect, whereas reportedly none did in the original experiment. They additionally listed anomalies in the original reported results, without describing them in the abstract.

These results leave the broader interpretation uncertain: the replications did not directly test the preference for playing or working alone, but they did fail to find a related effect from the original report. Neither abstract gives participants’ ages or demographic characteristics, so the findings cannot confidently be extended to particular groups.