Money And Morality

Money is defined as a medium for exchange; it is any confirmable record or object that is usable for buying or selling goods and services. Recent research suggests money itself may corrupt; people often act immorally to acquire it. Gino and Mogilner (2014) conducted a four-experiment research that is focused on time, a ubiquitous presence in people’s lives, to offset the harmful effects of money. According to their findings, it can be seen that priming money encourage unethical behavior, and in contrast, prime them to time discourages it. In addition, Gino and Mogilner suggest that by activating the conception of time implicitly, cuts down the rate of cheating behavior by making people engage in self-reflection. However, other research state that the condition when time is constrained need to be considered for the study; participants’ choices are different so the “priming time” study may not be accurate; the money priming study neglects the existence of moral people. Therefore, the link shown between time, money and morality by Gino and Mogilner (2014) may not be too applicable as the priming has limitations.

In contrast to the time prime study by Gino and Mogilner (2014), Jones (1991) found a relationship between time deliberation and moral judgment. When people feel time constrained, people may act less ethically. As gathering facts is needed, making moral judgments takes time and energy, having more time to make a decision could discourage unethical behavior, decrease the incentive to cheat and increase moral awareness. Jones is not alone in investigating the relationship between time and moral judgment, in a study by Suter and Hertwig (2011), 67 psychology students were randomly assigned to either the no-time pressure conditi...

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...ple feel time constrained, they act less ethically. The second limitation is participants are different and they are not experiencing the same social stimulus, therefore the results are not too applicable to real world scenarios. For instance, higher time for moral judgment leads to less ethical decisions (Zhong et al., 2010). The third limitation is the money prime research neglects the existence of moral people. Although people pledged to give the wealth to the charity may be limit, there are still numbers of people willing to give money towards to charity charitable activity, when charity is concerned in the money prime situation (Sanghera, 2011). Although Gino and Mogilner (2014) convincingly shown a link between time, money and morality has important applications, the three limitations stated run limit the usefulness and applicability to real world scenarios.