"Seeing money can change behavior"

From the AP via Yahoo! News:

Kathleen Vohs, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues, conducted a series of nine experiments in which people were asked to do puzzles or other tasks and the behavior of people exposed to money was compared to others who were not prompted to think about it.

[...]

In another experiment 44 students at Florida State University were each given $2 in quarters — which they were told was leftover from a previous experiment — and asked to unscramble sentences that divided them into two groups, one that was reminded of money by the sentence and others that were not.

When they left, the researcher noted that there was a box by the door for donations for needy students if they wanted to chip in, but they didn't have to.

On average, students who had read neutral sentences donated $1.34 while those whose sentences reminded them of money kept more for themselves, giving an average of just 77 cents.

[...]

Vohs research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chair Council.

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I dunno, [something about capitolism]. Its a really interesting study, I recommend reading all of it. I'm not exactly sure how to interpret the results, but they don't really suprise me. What would we do without Canada?