Lea & Webley BBS (2006) Money as Tool, Money as Drug PDF

BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29, 161– 209 Printed in the United States of America Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive Stephen E. G. Lea...

BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN Printed in the United States of America Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive Abstract: Why are people interested in money? reinforcing power of money, which seems to be of no biological significance in itself can become extension this is often applied to money: it is substances can be strong motivators because they which those incentives are instinctively sought. drug concept can also be extended metaphorically empirical literature about money, we conclude Tool Theory of money motivation; (ii) supplementing explained; and (iii) the human instincts that, reciprocal altruism) and object play. Keywords: economic behaviour; evolutionary psychology; 1. Why are people interested in money? This target article seeks to provide a biological explanation for one of the strongest motivations of humans living in modern societies: the desire to obtain money. We start by establishing some definitions. What do we mean by a “biological explanation”? What do we mean by money? And what do we mean by the motivation to obtain money? 1.1. Biological explanation By the 1950s, the “grand theories of everything” that had emerged in early twentieth-century psychology seemed to have become extinct. But with the publication of Richard Dawkins’ (1976) book The Selfish Gene, the strongly Darwinian approach that has been called, with slightly varying nuances, sociobiology or evolutionary psy- chology emerged as a new and potentially universal way of addressing the Why questions about human behaviour. If people do something, the sociobiological argument runs, it must be because (a) doing it confers a selective advantage; or (b) although doing it does not now confer a selective advantage, it did at some period in our evolutionary past, most likely in the early history of Homo sapiens, within the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation; or (c) the tendency to do it is a by-product of some other tendency, which does or did confer such an advantage. # 2006 Cambridge University Press 0140-525x/06 $12.50 Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug Biological explanation does not imply that human beha- viour is “innate,” “hard-wired,” or will inevitably take a particular form. Humans are social and cultural animals, and any observed human behaviour is the product of a par- ticular social and cultural environment interacting with human nature: genetically adaptive instincts are always manifested in culturally specified ways. Selective tage is not an alternative to social and cultural a kind of explanation, but if an explanation is to be classed as “biological,” then selective advantage must be part of it – even if the behaviour currently being explained, in current circumstances, confers no such advantage. 1.2. The nature of money In talking about money, we mean just that – money as a distinctive economic institution and embodiments in particular kinds of money stuff. We are investigating the psychology of money, not using metaphor for property and possessions (for which see Rudmin 1991) or economic activity generally (for which see, e.g., Lea et al. 1987; Webley et al. 2001). It may well be that someone who seeks out money is seeking it out for the sake of what it can buy. Indeed, one of the two theories that we consider here supposes that always the case (we call this the Tool Theory). But the point of our target article is that this is not vable theory, because although the desire for money is undeniably closely connected to the desire for that it can buy, the two are logically distinct be investigated separately. Part, but only part, investigation is to establish whether and how ogy of possessions, and of other human motives, psychology of money. Although we are talking about money in a narrow, crete sense, our notion of money stuff is broad. the coins and notes that are at the core of people’s of money in present-day societies (cf. Snelders but we also include both the so-called primitive moneys (Einzig 1966) and more modern ones, such as cheques, credit cards, marks in bank ledgers, and memory states of bank computers. Any substance or medium is within the scope of our discussion if it fulfils or appears the three basic functions of money: as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value further in sect. 3.1). 1.3. The motivation to obtain money By saying that people are motivated to obtain money, we mean that when people live in a culture where money is used, money enters into human behaviour in some of the same ways as commonly recognised motivators such as food or sex. More specifically, (a) money acts as an incentive: if people can perceive or understand that a par- ticular action is likely to lead to them obtaining money, they are more likely to perform that action (though they will not inevitably do so, since there may be constraints from conflicting motivations); and (b) money acts as a rein- forcer: actions that in the past led to a person receiving money are more likely to be repeated (though again, they will not inevitably be). 162 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 with no connection to human nature at all. That would make it an exception, perhaps even a unique exception, among strong human motives. We do not consider this “pure cultural” hypothesis directly in this target article, but indirectly it is under test since our task is to offer the best account we can of the biological origins of the money motive. If that account fails to convince, the pure cultural option would be all that remained. However, we cannot leave culture out of our account, because human instincts are always manifested in a cultural context. Much empirical and theoretical work on the human interest in money has been done within the culture-dominated sciences of sociology and anthropology. We will draw on data from these sources throughout this article, and in particular we will return to those analyses when we come to offer a synthetic account of the money motive (sect. 5). 1.5. Previous work Despite the obvious power of the money motive, money has been given little attention by psychologists writing about human motivation. There are no chapters devoted to it in general textbooks such as those by Mook (1987) or Weiner (1992), though extended accounts of specific psychological theories in relation to money can be found (e.g., Bornemann 1976). Conversely, although economics naturally deals with money, it has been so little influenced by evolutionary ideas (at least until fairly recently; cf. Boulding 1981) that economists have not recognized the problematic nature of the money motive. The questions we are interested in have mainly been addressed by writers who have crossed disciplinary boundaries and con- sidered money from an economic but also from a more general point of view: these include economists (e.g., Maital 1982; Scitovsky 1976), but also anthropologists (e.g., Crump 1981), sociologists (e.g., Simmel 1900/1978; Zelizer 1989), cultural historians (e.g., Seaford 2004), and literary theorists (e.g., Shell 1982), as well as psychologists (e.g., Furnham & Argyle 1998; Lea et al. 1987, Ch. 12; Van Veldhoven 1985). However, these sources offer general, comprehensive accounts of the psychology of money. The present article addresses a single more specific question: Is there a biological reason why money is such a powerful incentive? The question necessarily assumes that there is coherent set of behaviours that we can class as human reac- tions to money as an incentive, and that they have a single explanation. To the extent that we are able to find a biologi- cal reason for the strength of the money motive, we will be giving support to that assumption. 2. Tool Theory and Drug Theory Although money is unusual among powerful human motivators in having no immediate adaptive origins, it is not unique. There are other examples, and between them they furnish two classes of theory that can be applied to the problem of money motivation. We argue that between them these exhaust the possibilities for a biological psychology of that motivation. 2.1. Tool Theory Frequently, humans’ advanced culture and technology provide us with biologically unprecedented means to Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug wallet as a means of social display is almost as crude. But such aberrant uses of money are not what we are talking about in Tool Theory. Tool Theory accepts the metaphori- cal extension of the idea of a tool inherent in the word “instrumental”; it sees money as a means to an end. As we shall discuss in sect. 3.1, economic theory recognises that money has more than one function: it serves as a unit of account and a store of value, as well as a means of exchange. But that does not undermine the notion of money as a tool – it means that, like a screwdriver, it is a tool with a number of uses. Similarly, the possibility that money is used for purposes such as social display, social communication (Buchan 1997), or social protection (Doyle 1998) merely extends the range of uses for money as a tool. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to describe money, or anything else, as a “mere” tool; the idea of a tool is a potentially powerful one, and has been used by philosophers such as Heidegger (e.g. 1927/1962) and Innis (1984) to provide an account of basic phenom- ena of cognition and perception. 2.2. Drug Theory Although Tool Theory is the obvious account of the motivation to acquire money, tools are not the only class of biologically unprecedented objects that can acquire strong incentive properties. A second class can be briefly described as “drugs.” Just like the Tool Theory, the Drug Theory of money depends on a metaphorical exten- sion of the core idea, but we start with the most literal idea of a drug. 2.2.1. Drugs sensu stricto. Certain chemical substances, such as alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, tetra-hydro cannabinol, cocaine, and morphine, can all become strong incentives, but their incentive power does not depend on their ability to produce other goods and services. Instead, they produce distinct physiological states by direct action on some part of the body, usually the brain. The nervous system contains numerous receptors for natural sub- stances that play a role in the body’s normal functioning, and the existence of these receptors is readily explained as adaptive. Drugs in the strict sense usually act on such receptors, changing a person’s nervous state. But we do not explain the existence of binding sites for drugs as adap- tive. We do not envisage early humans, or our pre-hominid ancestors, gaining a selective advantage by smoking mari- juana. Instead, a psychoactive drug is thought of as a substance that by chance or by chemical similarity acts in the same way as a body chemical, and which is therefore able to intrude upon the normal functioning of the nervous system. By mimicking the action of some natural substance, it produces an abnormal response without being part of an ordered, functional sequence. The Drug Theory of money motivation asserts that money, too, intrudes on the normal functioning of the nervous system. Clearly, however, money is not a psychoactive chemical, so to develop the Drug Theory we need a meta- phorically extended concept of a drug, just as the Tool Theory of money requires an extended concept of a tool. 2.2.2. Perceptual drugs. Alcohol, nicotine, and the other substances listed above are all familiarly recognized as psy- choactive drugs. There are other substances, however, that 164 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 that could be supposed to have an innate effect. Porno- graphy here serves as an extreme example of a general fact: we can be emotionally engaged by many kinds of text, and therefore motivated to read them. Any such text must be thought of as a “cognitive drug.” Its effect depends on what we know and understand, not on what we perceive; but like nicotine, like saccharin, and like the knitting needle that Tinbergen showed to herring gull chicks, it elicits a response without delivering the effects that make it adaptive for the organism to make that response. 2.2.4. The drug metaphor and Drug Theory. It may seem that we have extended the concept of a “drug” ably, so let us recapitulate what we have discarded and what we have retained. We have discarded the idea of a chemical with an identifiable locus of action in the central nervous system. But we have retained the idea of a drug as a deceiver: a stimulus that is of no biological significance in itself, but which has motivational properties because it produces the same neural, behavioural, or psychological effect as some other stimulus that is biologically significant. A drug in this extended sense is any functionless motivator, obtaining its motivational effect by a parasitic action on a functional, evolutionarily adaptive system. It is from this metaphorical definition of a drug that we derive our second biological account of the psychology of money, which we call Drug Theory. On this account, money acquires its incentive power because it mimics the neural, behavioural, or psychological action of some other, more natural incentive. Obviously, we are not suggesting that there are biochemical receptor sites in the brain on which, say, chemicals released by used five- pound notes react. Nor are we suggesting that money has a direct effect via the sense organs, like saccharin or visual pornography. But we do suggest that money can “act like” natural incentives at a cognitive vational power flows at least partly from this. In describing money as a cognitive drug, however, we do not mean to dis- embody its action. Although the response to money must be mediated through the cognitive system, it is nonetheless an affective response, just as the response to pornography, or fiction, is not coldly cognitive. Cognitive drugs involve hot cognition (Anderson 1981). Furthermore, cognitive pro- cesses do imply correlated brain processes. The rapidly expanding research field of neuroeconomics (Glimcher 2003) has already shown, through brain imaging studies, that specific brain centres are activated in the presence of money (e.g., Zink et al. 2004), and immediate monetary incentives stimulate parts of the brain that are associated with immediate reward, not delayed reward (McClure et al. 2004). This is the opposite of what would be expected from Tool Theory, since on such a theory money is only interesting because of the biologically relevant rewards it can produce at a later time – a conclusion that is reinforced by the fact that in McClure et al.’s experiment, money was delivered in the form of tokens for an online the final reward could only be obtained after Why should we use the drug metaphor for money, rather than some other alternative to Tool Theory? The core reason is that a drug is a functionless motivator, and that is what we want to assert that money sometimes is. But there are also other features of classic drugs that Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug that explicitly or implicitly specify psychological mechan- isms for money motivation. We are not attempting an assessment of the plausibility of these theories, but rather characterising them as versions either of Tool Theory or Drug Theory. These categorizations are of course ours, not those of the original authors, who might well have disagreed with them. 3.1. The economic theory of money A typical economic textbook account states: whether money is shells or rocks or gold or paper, in any economy it has three primary functions: it is a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. Of these three functions, its function as a medium of exchange is what distinguishes money from other assets such as stocks, bonds or houses. (Mishkin 1992, p. 21) All that matters, for something to function in these ways, is that all members of the relevant society should accept that it does so function. As Carruthers and Babb (1996) put it, money is a “self-fulfilling collective prophecy.” Economists (and others) have divided sharply on what enables something to be accepted as money. On the one hand, there is the view – which, as Schumpeter (1954/ 1994) shows, goes back to Aristotle – that money must either have an “intrinsic” value, or at least be backed by a reliable promise from the issuing authority to exchange it for something of intrinsic value. Money that has this property is called “commodity” money, signalling that the substance that is used as money, or that backs money, would be sought for its own sake even if it were not used as money. It is also referred to as “convertible” money, signifying that the money substance can be con- verted into the underlying commodity. Because in complex economies the source of intrinsic or commodity value has usually been gold, the view that money must be convertible in order to be effective is known as “metal- lism” or “bullionism.” It is by no means extinct; modern monetarist economic theory is its direct descendant 2001; Ingham 2001). The alternative view claims that money becomes acceptable by government fiat, that is, by its designation as legal tender. Money with this property is called “fiat,” “fiduciary,” “chartal,” or “nonconvertible” (2001) shows, this view, too, is ancient, but it first came to prominence with Adam Smith (1776/1908). Fierce political debates between bullionists and chartalists arose in Great Britain following a suspension of convertibility in 1797 (Perlman 1986), and in the United States after the end of the Civil War, during which both sides suspended convertibility (Carruthers & Babb 1996). Both commodity and fiat accounts of money face diffi- culties. The well-documented emergence of cigarettes as a money substitute in prisoner-of-war camps looks like excellent evidence for a commodity theory, but it poses two core problems: Why should people trade with a com- modity instead of consuming it, and if they do use a com- modity for trade, why does it generally circulate at a higher value than it is worth for consumption (Burdett et al. 2001)? To bullionists, on the other hand, fiat money poses two problems. First, why should people ever trust a purely arbitrary token? Second, if the value of money is created by the mere act of declaring it to be legal tender, what is to stabilise its value – especially as the 166 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 faeces, with the important difference that it is acceptable to parents and society at large for a child to take a close interest in money. 3.2.2. Operant psychology. A very different kind of bio- logical psychology provides a further example of a Drug Theory. Skinner (1953, p. 79) accounted for money within his radical behaviourism as a generalised token reinforcer. It is well established that stimuli paired with unconditioned reinforcers can acquire reinforcing power and are then called conditioned (or secondary) reinforcers; if the stimuli are tangible objects, they are called token reinforcers. Skinner argued (p. 77) that if a single kind of conditioned reinforcer was paired with many different kinds of unconditioned reinforcers, its reinforcing effect would become independent of deprivation of any of them. Operant psychologists have seen this process as pro- viding a good account of the reinforcing power of money. To a cognitive psychologist, the token reinforcement would be seen as a means to an end, and a conditioned reinforcement theory of money would be a version of Tool Theory. But within a radically behaviourist account, the incentive power of tokens, and hence of money, derives from mere association with the goods and services it can buy; behaviour is not to be explained by supposing that organisms understand causal relations. Skinner is deliberately agnostic about the brain mechanisms of reinforcement processes, but it is clear that, however unconditioned reinforcers act, conditioned reinforcers must act in the same way, marking Skinner’s theory as a pure Drug Theory. Skinner’s is not the only behaviourist account of secondary or conditioned reinforcement (see the collections edited by Hendry 1969a and Wike 1966), though it is the one that has been applied most explicitly to explain behaviour towards money. However, other accounts share the essential feature of Skinner’s, that the attraction to money develops through mechanistic principles of conditioning, and they too are therefore drug theories. 3.2.3. The functional autonomy of drives. A similar approach to money comes from social and personality psychology. Allport (1937) coined the phrase “functional autonomy” to describe motives that emerge from antece- dent systems but become independent of them, so that the link with the original motive is historical and not func- tional and “‘young’ systems may become stronger than the older systems” (p. 363). Money can be seen as a good example of this process. This too is a kind of Drug Theory: though the motive to acquire money is a self- sustaining system, its origins are in more basic motives and it presumably acts on the brain in the same way as the comforts that it procures. 3.2.4. Cognitive development and money. As Webley (2004) explains, Piagetians have proposed that children’s understanding of money passes through a series of stages. The number of stages proposed has varied, but in all cases the notion is that children are, step by step, learn- ing how to operate within the economy of adults and how to use its institutions, especially money. This approach clearly focuses on the instrumental use of money, and thus qualifies as a Tool Theory. Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug road leads to the centre, to money. The whole specific sense of enjoyment and power would be misinterpreted if one were to reverse this direction and wished to lead it back again from the terminal point to the periphery” (Simmel 1900/1978, p. 245). Although Simmel was a significant figure in the history of sociology, he had relatively little immediate influence; for example, Philosophie des Geldes was not translated into English until nearly 80 years after its first publication. The major development of social science thinking about money in the early twentieth century came instead from anthropology, with the work of Malinowski (e.g., Mali- nowski 1922) and, in particular, Mauss (1925/1954) on gift exchanges in non-Western cultures. These ethno- graphic studies supplied an empirical basis, lacking in the classic sociologists’ work, for assertions about what exchange might be like in the absence of money. They showed that exchange can take place without money – but also that it is distinctly different from exchange in a modern economy. They thus tended to confirm that money is not just a neutral tool, but an institution with a transformative potential. Even from this brief survey, it can be seen that there are many different nuances within the classic sociological and anthropological analyses of money. However, these ana- lyses share a rejection of a purely economic account – not necessarily as wrong, but certainly as inadequate. In different ways, they see its invention or introduction as corrupting or transforming previous patterns of exchange; but even if money diminishes the social content of exchanges, it does not abolish it. As a result, money is sought for reasons that go beyond its instrumental func- tion. To varying degrees and in differing ways, therefore, these classic sociological accounts are versions of Drug Theory. 3.3.2. Modern sociology of money. Recent decades have seen a revival of interest in the sociology of money, often involving a fusion of ideas from classic sociological theory (especially that of Simmel) with more recent anthropological data. Important contributors to the modern sociological theory of money include Carruthers (e.g. Carruthers & Espeland 1998), Dodd (1994), Doyle (e.g., 2001), Ingham (e.g., 1996; 2001), Singh (e.g., 1996), and Zelizer (e.g., 1994). Less strictly academic accounts such as those of Buchan (1997), Millman (1991), and Needleman (1994) have also contributed to the modern view of the place of money in society. These writings cover many aspects of money other than the motivation to acquire it, so a full review of them would be beyond the scope of this target article. A recurring theme within them, however, is the social interactionis perspective, resulting in a tension between two ideas. On the one hand is the notion that money anon- ymizes social interactions, and on the other is nition that money is imbued with social meaning and thereby links things and people together (Newton 2003). Zelizer, who has taken a less hostile and pessimistic view of money’s role in society than have many other modern social theorists, particularly stresses how money retains meaning beyond the particular transaction in which it is obtained or used (e.g., Zelizer 1989; 1996). Conversely, Ingham (2001) argues that the fundamental nature of modern money is the abstract recognition of a debt, so 168 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 have shown that quite a lot of human behaviour towards money can be accounted for in terms of what we are calling Tool Theory, because this is the “obvious” account. In this section, we review several lines of evi- dence showing that something beyond the rational use of a tool is involved. We argue that many of these exceptional findings are well accounted for by a Drug Theory. 4.1. Perceiving coins Bruner and Goodman (1947) found that children tend to overestimate the sizes of coins relative to other, physically similar, stimuli. This report caused considerable contro- versy, and a series of experiments by other authors clari- fied the result, without however shaking the basic claim that there is something special about money objects at the psychological level (Saugstad & Schioldborg 1966). More recent research has supported that claim by looking at how the perception of money is changed by his- torical changes in the money system and the value of money. Lea (1981) found that pre-decimal British coins were remembered as larger than the identical coins under their decimal names, devalued by a decade of rapid inflation. Furnham (1983) found a similar effect for an obsolete design of pound note, and further research along the same lines has been carried out in other countries by Leiser and Izak (1987) and Brysbaert and d’Ydewalle (1989). A Drug Theory can account for these phenomena by asserting that the value of money gives it a special status, which interferes with normal perceptual/ cognitive processing. It is not obvious how a Tool Theory can accommodate these phenomena. 4.2. Money illusion In the presence of inflation, economic events and choices that take place over time can be denominated either in terms of nominal values – the actual money amounts – or in terms of real values – purchasing power. If people are influenced to some extent by nominal rather than real values, they are said to be suffering from “money illusion” (Fisher 1928). Although the possibility of money illusion was for decades dismissed by theoretical economists, it has now been demonstrated in economic experiments (Fehr & Tyran 2001) and survey studies (Shafir et al. 1997). It is also ubiquitous in ordinary economic life. At the population level, consumers demonstrate money illu- sion in relation both to the entire economy (e.g., Dowd, 1992) and to individual commodities (e.g., Franke 1994). Consumer money illusion can also be seen at the individ- ual level, for example in price estimation in different cur- rencies (e.g., Gamble et al. 2002) and in the effects of currency change on charitable donation (Kooreman et al. 2004). Money illusion can also be demonstrated in produ- cers: for example, in the borrowing behaviour of small firms (Machauer & Weber 1998) and in the response of independent professionals to changes in state-mandated fees (Mayer & Rozier 2000). Investors, too, suffer from money illusion (e.g., Miller & Schulman 1999; Modigliani & Cohn 1979). The downward trend in the value of non- resident fathers’ child support payments in the United States seems to be in part attributable to money illusion on the part of judges, lawyers, and parents (Hanson et al. 1996). Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug the end of the Soviet Union caused a return to barter in many sectors of the Russian economy (Woodruff 1999), for lack of any alternative. But in Central Europe, where other forms of money (dollars, Deutschmarks, and now euros) were more readily available, it was these rather than barter that filled the gap. Moreover, although some forms of “plastic money” have spread successfully, others have failed spectacularly. There have been a number of high-profile attempts to introduce “electronic purses”, a kind of “smart card” where the record of money available is stored on the card itself rather than in a central bank computer; all have failed to gain public acceptance, despite apparent technical advantages (Truman et al. 2003). New forms of money are in general not less func- tional than old forms, indeed the reason for introducing them is that they will be better tools for exchange; but they seem to need to show a substantial advantage over old forms before people will adopt them. The reaction to them is often emotive rather than calculative. We conclude the people become attached to money objects themselves, as predicted by Drug Theory. 4.4. Money attitudes Economic psychologists have developed a number of psychometric scales that assess attitudes towards money – for example, the Money Attitudes Scale (Yamauchi & Templer 1982), the Money Beliefs and Behaviour Scale (Furnham 1984), and the Love of Money Scale (Tang 1995). These scales are always multifactorial, yielding anything from three to eight factors. Although the details vary between scales and studies, the common experience is to find more or less orthogonal factors relating to power and prestige, to distrust and anxiety, and to reten- tion and other temporal issues. Tang and his colleagues have found separate and virtually orthogonal factors for an affective component (assessment of money as good or evil), a cognitive component (money seen as an indicator of achievement, respect, and freedom or power), and a behavioural component relating to practical budgeting. Furthermore, these factors enter into different relation- ships with other variables of both economic and psycho- logical interest, such as job satisfaction, business ethics, work motivation, and life satisfaction (Luna-Arocas & Tang 2004; Tang & Chiu 2003; Tang & Gilbert 1995). These results demonstrate a dissociation between the instrumental and affective aspects of money. In our terms, therefore, they do not suggest that either Tool Theory or Drug Theory is correct and the other wrong; they suggest that money has both tool-like properties and drug-like properties, and the two are psychologically dissociated, so that neither kind of theory could give a complete account on its own. 4.5. Restrictions on money use The primitive moneys of non-Western societies often could only be used for certain kinds of exchange, or there might be several different money systems, each con- fined to a particular class of commodities or a particular group of people. Such restrictions on use represent a failure of the tool function of money. It might be argued that special-purpose moneys correspond to special- purpose tools, which are after all common in most kinds 170 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 affectional context. Thompson et al. (2003) document how topless dancers in the United States use the fact that they are paid for what they are doing to help distance them- selves psychologically and emotionally from it, and from their clients. Prasad (1999) shows that prostitutes’ clients use similar mental strategies to distance themselves morally and emotionally from the women they use. The sense that there may be exchanges that should not be conducted in money goes wider than gifts or sex. Devel- oping ideas from Simmel (1900/1978), Holt and Searls (1994) list the family sphere, and consumption of religion, high art, and education, among the areas where people resist “the market’s commodification of the mediated by money. Even this list is not exhaustive: Desforges (2001) documents how Western tourists some- times feel that any monetary transactions at all between them and local inhabitants in “exotic” travel destinations render their travel experiences inauthentic. Fiske and Tetlock (1997) make the point that people do not just find it difficult to estimate the value of their children, their loyalty to their country, or acts of friendship: they find it morally offensive even to be asked to try. Zelizer (1996) makes similar points about bonuses given by firms. Thus, there are many situations where money is not the preferred tool for exchange, or even is not accep- table at all. Surprisingly, it is often much more acceptable if money is replaced by something that is clearly money’s worth, even something with a precise monetary value such as a book token, a gift certificate of defined value that can be used only for the purchase of books (Webley et al. 1983). These data suggest that money has special properties that are not captured by the Tool Theory. But do they give any direct support to the Drug Theory? What seems to lie at the root of these social rules is a perhaps-unformu- lated belief that to give someone money is to move the transaction out of the realm of ordinary social exchange into a different, economic, sphere, so that what should be a gift or a means of thanks becomes payment – and that is something quite different. The prevailing rhetoric of most societies is that gifts are given, and sex is shared, for reasons other than material benefit. Gifts and sex are the currency of the moral and romantic economy, and to confuse them with the currency of the material economy is somehow to contaminate them. These social rules restricting money use could be taken to suggest that money is different from “real” incentives, such as “real” praise, “real” affection, or “real” gratitude, that money is a mere tool, different from the real objec- tives it subserves – that though you can in a sense buy love, happiness, and truth, there remains a love, a truth, and a happiness you cannot buy (Needleman 1994, pp. 237ff). We argue, however, that these results show pre- cisely that money is not, or not just, a tool. If it was a tool, it would always be an acceptable surrogate for other objectives. From an instrumental point of view, money is the best gift of all because the recipient can use it to buy exactly what he or she wants. The empirical results show that this point of view cannot be complete. Money-mediated exchanges are different from other exchanges, and under at least some circumstances, people avoid them. Under a Drug Theory, this avoidance is easy to explain: such a theory asserts that money is psy- chologically special and that it acts on us in ways other than Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug same money puzzles as evidence in favour of a Drug Theory. Like the data on money attitudes, therefore, Belk and Wallendorf’s analysis supports the need for a dual theory. Related research includes Oliven’s (1998) examination of the social functions of money in the United States from the standpoint of an anthropologist from a less finan- cially developed society, Brazil. Oliven argues that in America, money is what Mauss called a “total social fact.” Oliven argues that whereas in a society like Brazil’s money is seen as polluting, in the mature capitalist society of the United States it pervades all social relation- ships and takes over all metaphors, being associated with love, death, blood, semen, food, and God. Again in our terms, it is hard to see how money can be regarded only as a tool when it has become so involved in a society’s expression of itself, though the dramatically ception of the importance of tools found in the philosophers of technology such as Innis (1984) might provide a viable approach. We argue, however, that it is easier to take these wide-ranging social phenomena as evidence of a drug dimension to the motivation for money. 4.8. Money and social status Both classic and recent sociologists and social psycholo- gists have stressed the importance of money as a marker of status within modern societies. To some extent money here serves as shorthand for general wealth, possessions, and consumption: Veblen’s (1899/1979) original develop- ment of the idea of a status symbol was much more concerned with things that money can buy than with the possession of money itself. Status is established through consumption in non-monetised or weakly monetised traditional societies as well as in modern economies (e.g., in the potlatch ceremonies of Northwestern Native Americans; see Aldona 1991). Nevertheless, statements of people’s wealth or income, in numerical money terms, are a common part of discourse about status; nineteenth century English fiction is rich in examples. People differ in the extent to which they interpret wealth as a sign of status, and indeed the extent to which they attribute value to objects on the basis of their financial cost; the tendency to do so is referred to as “materialism” and, from Belk (1984) on, reliable and valid scales to measure it have been developed [see Richins (2004) for a recent review]. People high in materialism seek happiness through wealth and possessions (and tend not to achieve it; see, e.g., Burroughs & Rindfleisch 2002). This self- defeating nature of materialism might lead us to claim this area as one that is well explained by a Drug Theory of money. However, it is probably better seen as calling for an elaborated Tool Theory in which money is used as an instrument to assess or obtain social status and happi- ness. This is not among the functions of money conceived of by economic theory, but it is different from the pursuit of money for its own sake. 4.9. Money work Even in societies that are not as money-dominated as the United States, the ubiquity of money means that many people work directly and continuously with money they do not own. Jinkings (2000) explores some of the 172 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 4.11. Summary A consistent theme emerges from these very different kinds of empirical research on money. The evidence is not that Tool Theory is wrong, but rather that it is inadequate, and inadequate in specific ways. In a range of situations, money is found to have a value and an emotional charge that is not predicted by its economic use. In some situations this leads to only marginal effects, such as the sentimental clinging to a few outdated coins. In other, closely related situations, the effects are strong enough to determine the economic policies of nations. It is one thing to accept that money is not just a tool for carrying out the functions that economic theory prescribes for it. It is another to accept our suggestion that its additional psychological effects can be captured by cate- gorising it as a cognitive drug. We argue, however, that this analysis is fruitful, on two grounds. First, because it captures the parasitic, functionless quality of money motivation that characterises many of the situations we have described. Second, however, it leads on to an evol- utionary account of these phenomena, and of the incentive value of money in general, which we will set out in the final section of this article. If that explanation is accepted, the importance of the drug metaphor fades; it will have done its job in linking together phenomena and rephrasing the question about money motivation in a form that can be more readily answered. 5. A synthetic theory of money 5.1. The need for synthesis Lea et al. (1987) tried to accommodate what was then known about the psychology of money within a loose theoretical framework in which money was seen as multi- ply symbolic. In evolutionary terms, this account is vague and underspecified: What is meant by a symbol, and what selective pressures does it respond to? What that analysis did capture was the notion that money in modern society has more forms, and more functions, than the simple economic Tool Theory would allow. In section 4 we showed that modern research in economic psychology is uncovering an increasing range of money phenomena that Tool Theory cannot account for. We have argued here that these phenomena call for some version of the Drug account: money seems to act on the human brain in ways that mimic more natural incentives, not just by being an instrument for access to them. It would be foolish to deny the force of the Tool Theory. Money does have functions, and new forms of money are constantly being invented to fulfil those functions in new ways. The range of new forms that money has taken in recent decades, and the speed with which people have adopted some of them (see sect. 4.3), show that the instru- mentality SCIENCES (2006) 29, 161– 209 Stephen E. G. Lea University of Exeter, School of Psychology, Washington Singer Laboratories, Exeter EX4 4QG, United Kingdom [email protected] http://www.exeter.ac.uk/SEGLea Paul Webley University of Exeter, School of Psychology, Washington Singer Laboratories, Exeter EX4 4QG, United Kingdom [email protected] http://www.exeter.ac.uk/pwebley Specifically, what could be the biological basis for the extraordinary incentive and unique to the human species? We identify two ways in which a commodity which is a strong motivator. The first is if it is used as a tool, and by a metaphorical used instrumentally, in order to obtain biologically relevant incentives. Second, imitate the action of natural incentives but do not produce the fitness gains for The classic examples of this process are psychoactive drugs, but we argue that the to provide an account of money motivation. From a review of theoretical and that (i) there are a number of phenomena that cannot be accounted for by a pure Tool Theory with a Drug Theory enables the anomalous phenomena to be according to a Drug Theory, money parasitizes include trading (derived from giving; incentive; money; motivation; play; reciprocal altruism STEPHEN LEA is Professor of Psychology at the Univer- sity of Exeter, U.K. He is the author of more than 150 publications spanning the areas of animal cognition, behavioural ecology, economic behaviour, and human visual perception. As well as being one of the founders of modern economic psychology in Europe, he is well known for his research on pattern recognition and concept discrimination in birds, and for bringing together ecological, economic, and psychological approaches in the analysis of both human and animal behaviour. Within economic psychology he has special- ised in the study of debt and giving, as well as the psychology of money, but has also co-authored or edited several more general books with Paul Webley. PAUL WEBLEY is Professor of Economic Psychology and currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the Univer- sity of Exeter, U.K. His books include The Individual in the Economy (Lea et al. 1987), Tax Evasion: An Experimental Approach (Webley et al. 1991), New Directions in Economic Psychology: Theory, Exper- iment and Application (Lea et al. 1992), Children’s Saving (Sonuga-Barke & Webley 1993), and The Econ- omic Psychology of Everyday Life (Webley et al. 2001). His current research is concerned with the economic psychology of personal money management (saving, debt, investment), tax compliance, and children’s econ- omic behaviour. 161 We treat these effects of money as “stylised facts.” They could be questioned, but in this article we accept them without further discussion. Our aim is to explain them by reference to other known human motivations, known features of human nature, or particular features of the socialization of children. advan- factors as 1.4. The problem Most strong human motivations have two characteristic properties, which make them easy to explain in evolution- ary terms: 1. Adaptiveness: The motivations direct people towards, or away from, stimuli of obvious significance for the survival of individuals or the propagation of their genes. This is true not only of motivations such as hunger and thirst that are related to individual tissue money itself, needs, but also of such motives as the need for social com- its physical panions, sexual drives, and parental care. 2. Darwinian continuity: The motivations are either it as a exact homologues of motives that exist in all or many related species of animals, or (more commonly) they are obviously derived from such motives. Continuity does not require that human motives should be identical to those of other animals. Humans hunger for a wider and more culturally defined range of foods than do other this is apes (cf. Mennell et al. 1992); human sexual motivations are unusually independent of the biological need to repro- the only concei- duce (e.g., Symons 1979); human curiosity takes us into scientific explorations that are unparalleled by the explora- the things tory motivations shown by many other species (cf. Berlyne and need to 1960); human politics are much more complex than the of that socially motivated behaviours of, say, chimpanzees (cf. the psychol- de Waal 1982; 1996). Many of these variations on motiva- leads to a tional themes are informed by, and informative about, cultural differences. But we have no difficulty in under- con- standing where these complex human motivations come We include from, evolutionarily speaking, and we can speculate in concept sensible ways about how they have become more et al. 1992), complex over the five million years or so since the diver- gence of the ancestral lines that led to chimpanzees and bonobos on the one hand, and humans on the other. Most human motives show adaptiveness and Darwinian continuity in an obvious way. It is therefore reasonable to to fulfil talk about people as displaying a “hunger instinct” or a “sex instinct” or even a “political instinct” – though we must (discussed always recognise that the way in which those instincts play out in actual human behaviour is a function of culture and individual experience; they are not instincts in the sense of being inflexible, hardwired micro- mechanisms. The motivation to acquire money, however, is not directly adaptive, and has no obvious parallels in the behaviour of other animals. Furthermore, it cannot be imagined to result from some evolutionary process that has occurred within the hominid period: money has emerged only within the last 3,000 years or so (Davies 2002), too short a time for significant genetic adaptation to its existence; besides, individuals born into cultures that have never used money quickly come to use it if they move into a money-using culture. Money, therefore, is a problem for a biological account of human motivation. We cannot reasonably talk about a “money instinct.” It is possible that there is no biological basis at all for our attraction to money, that it is a pure creation of culture, Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug familiar ends. For example, humans (and only humans) will use time and effort to acquire such modern artefacts as newspapers, radios, or television sets. The incentive value of newspapers is not biologically problematic. They are a means of gaining information about the environment, and most advanced animals can benefit from such infor- mation: dogs use time and effort to sniff lampposts and chaffinches use time and effort to listen to one another’s songs. The biological value of information has been formally analysed in studies of group foraging in many species of vertebrate (e.g., Mesterton-Gibbons & Dugatkin 1999; Ward & Zahavi 1973), and operant psychologists have shown that information may function as an effective reward in nonhumans (e.g., Catania 1975; Hendry 1969b), though only when it is correlated with a reduction in the delay before reward (Case & Fantino 1981). Similarly, many mammals seek out shelter to spend the inactive period of their daily cycles and to hide their developing offspring; many manufacture shel- ters for such purposes; badgers dig setts, beavers build dams, and chimpanzees weave nests. None use bricks, mortar, and timber to build themselves houses, but we do not regard human house building as a biologically pro- blematic activity, or the incentive value of building tools and materials as a biologically problematic motivation. The Tool Theory sees money in the same light. Econ- omists have argued since the earliest days of the discipline that when two people exchange scarce resources, the exchange can increase the wealth of both parties (e.g., Smith 1776/1908). Money is the most efficient means yet discovered of making such exchanges possible. It is not the only means: among the other examples that have been analysed are the gift-mediated exchanges that were used by the Trobriand Islanders (Malinowski 1922), and the bartering systems by which tools were traded over quite long distances in New Guinea and Queensland (Sahlins 1974, Ch. 6). But these exchanges do not circulate goods anything like so quickly, nor do they produce such a large social gain in wealth, as money-mediated exchanges. On this view, money is not an incentive in itself; it is an incentive only because and only insofar as it can be exchanged for goods and services. Those goods and ser- vices are among that majority of incentives that do demon- strate adaptiveness and Darwinian continuity, and if money is a strong incentive, it is because the goods and services it will buy are strong incentives. According to Tool Theory, we do not need a psychology of money at all, or we need it only in a limited sense: we only have to understand the job that money does and the human cogni- tive system that enables us to use it. Cognitive psychology may allow us to understand why a system of a 100 cents to the dollar has replaced Charlemagne’s system of 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound, but such understanding hardly deserves the name of a psychology of money. In the same way as a literal tool like a screwdri- ver mediates between our need to connect pieces of wood and the limited strength and dexterity of our hands and arms, so money mediates between our need to exchange commodities and the limited evaluating power of our brains. Obviously money is a tool only in a metaphorical sense. You can use money as a literal tool – as when you use a coin to undo the battery compartment of a bicycle lamp or use a $100 bill to light a cigar. Flaunting a well-filled BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 163 meet the essential definition of a psychoactive drug as having a nonfunctional, direct, effect on the nervous system that affects our mental state. An instructive example is saccharin, which produces much the same motivational effect as natural sugars like fructose or lactose, without being a nutritive carbohydrate. It differs from alcohol or caffeine in that it produces an instant, perceptual effect instead of a longer lasting effect on mood, and in the fact that the receptors it acts on are in our sense organs, not in our central nervous system. But neither seems to be an important point of principle: we might reasonably call saccharin a “perceptual drug” to note that it has a drug-like action, but not directly on the central nervous system. The historian of sugar, Sidney Mintz, refers even to sucrose as a “drug food” (e.g., Mintz 1986), on the grounds that its psychological effects are disproportionate to those of the sugars found in unpro- cessed foods. If we grant this extension of the notion of a drug, we can see that there are many other stimuli that produce the same perceptual effect as some natural motivator, but are not associated with any benefit to the perceiver. Early ethologists discovered many stimuli that resembled the Sign Stimulus for a Fixed Action Pattern sufficiently to trigger a response: for example, cardboard disks elicited sexual pursuit in Grayling butterflies, a striped knitting needle elicited begging in herring gull chicks, and an Easter egg elicited brooding in greylag geese (Tinbergen 1951). Although it is to a male Grayling’s evolutionary advantage to court a female Grayling, the butterfly gains nothing in fitness terms by pursuing a cardboard disk. Furthermore, many natural sign stimuli will act as reinfor- cers or incentives (e.g., Thompson 1963), and in all cases that have been investigated, the artificial sign stimuli discovered by the ethologists have the same reinforcing or incentive effects as the natural stimuli they mimic. They therefore constitute a kind of functionless motivator. Like saccharin, they could be called “perceptual drugs.” Any “dishonest signalling” system exploits this perceptual drug action, and there are many such systems in nature. Well-known examples include the chicks of cuckoos or other brood parasites eliciting feeding from the host parents by means of gaping behaviour and throat linings that resemble those of host chicks, and deceptive orchids eliciting copulatory probing from bumblebees and thereby achieving pollen transfer. There are also situations within human cultures that seem to work in the same way. Visual pornography, or the exaggerated drawings used in cartoons and advertising, can elicit and in some sense satisfy sexual or parental motivations (Lea 1984). Such stimuli are only functionless in the strict, evolutionary sense of function. Within the life of the indi- vidual organism, they provide the same kind of gratifica- tion as the corresponding fully functional stimulus. But unlike that stimulus, they are not associated with the incre- ment of biological fitness that, we assume, drove the evolution of the motivational system in question. 2.2.3. Cognitive drugs. Pornographic pictures mimic natural visual stimuli that are instinctually sexually arous- ing, for functional reasons that are well understood in prin- ciple even if the details are open to much debate. But what about pornographic text? Such material can undoubtedly be sexually arousing, but it does not mimic any stimulus Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug help make the metaphor persuasive. Drugs can be very strong motivators; they are often addictive; an attraction to them frequently has bad consequences for the individ- ual; and they give immediate reward where “real” motiva- tors can only do so over an extended period. As we discuss in section 4, all these features have been alleged of money. But while these additional features of the money motiv- ation make the idea of “money as drug” attractive, they do not define it. Finding that money did not possess these additional drug-like properties would make the Drug Theory less attractive, but not useless; finding that money never acts as a functionless motivator would undermine it completely. unreason- 2.3. Alternatives Could there be other accounts of the incentive value of money which do not fit within either Tool Theory or Drug Theory? Both assert that money gives access to bio- logical rewards. Tool Theory covers cases where money gives real but indirect access to such rewards; Drug Theory covers cases where it gives direct access to the systems that subserve such rewards, but in an illusory, nonfunctional way. Given that we are looking for a biologi- cal understanding of money motivation, and given that we are taking as unarguable that there has not been time for the evolution of a direct, functional, brain system to detect and respond to the acquisition of money, the two theories seem to exhaust the range of possibilities between them. Tool Theory covers the cases where acquiring money is motivated by a real underlying func- tion; Drug Theory covers the cases of functionless money motivation. It remains possible that an alternative, completely nonbiological, model could give a more econ- omical account of the phenomena (see sect. 1.4). This means that only in a limited sense can we infer a role for Drug Theory from any failure of Tool Theory. If level, and its moti- Tool Theory fails, Drug Theory is then the only possible biological theory, and vice versa. But that is not evidence that it is a satisfactory biological theory, only that there is no better biological alternative. Money is neither literally a tool nor literally a drug. These are both metaphors, which we have used in an attempt to capture and contrast two distinct ways of explaining money within a biological approach to motiv- ation. We believe that between them they do exhaust the field of human behaviour towards money, but clearly they are not the only conceivable way of partitioning that field. With sufficient sophistication, it is virtually certain that the tool metaphor could be extended to cover all the phenomena which we shall conclude are better explained by a drug metaphor, and vice versa. Our most fundamental aim in this target article, therefore, is not to establish the superiority of one of these metaphors over the other, but to deploy these metaphors in a rela- tively simple form to demonstrate the complexity of the phenomena of money psychology. bookshop, so a delay of days. 3. Theories of money and money motivation Tool Theory and Drug Theory, as we have developed them here, are broad classes of psychological theories about the money motive. We now consider some particular theories BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 165 government may well be motivated to change the value for policy reasons, to the detriment of economic affairs? Bell (2001) and Ingham (2001) trace from Adam Smith, through Keynes and other twentieth-century economists, the argument that government gives fiat money its value by declaring that it is acceptable in settlement of tax liabil- ities. Ingham extends the argument, suggesting (following Grierson; e.g., Grierson 1978) that the process of money creation has an older history in the use of money to settle other kinds of non-market debts such as bride- price and the compensations for injury (Wergeld) that were common in early Germanic societies. The creation of value through tax demands answers the metallists’ theoretical questions, and the historical observation that governments often do interfere with the value of money is good evidence that modern money is in fact fiat money. The chartalist account of money is an obvious Tool Theory. However, from our perspective, the metallist notion that abstract money must be backed by real goods is a version of Drug Theory. Gold and silver make good coinage because of their durability. But, according to metallism, nothing can work as money unless there is a market for it for non-money purposes. Such a market requires the substance to be scarce (which is true of gold and silver) but also desirable as a result of some human motive, which must therefore ultimately have a biological grounding. In the case of precious metals, their ultimate incentive value is aesthetic: the desire for beauty seems to be a biologically grounded motivation for our species, and gold and silver are useful in making beautiful and durable objects. According to the metallists, money backed by gold functions as a representation or symbol of that desirable thing, and though they were at pains to distinguish the symbol from the thing symbolised (see Carruthers & Babb 1996), they were clear that it is because of the thing symbolised that money, the symbol, is desired. It is only because of this drug-like, mimicking property that money is able to function as a tool. (Bell 3.2. Psychological theories of money We review briefly here some historically important accounts of the psychology of money; they have been sur- money. As Bell veyed in more detail elsewhere (e.g., Furnham & Argyle 1998, Ch. 1; Lea et al. 1987, Ch. 12). 3.2.1. Depth psychology. Freud (1908/1959) commented explicitly on the question of money, and in his discussion of the anal character acknowledged that style of money management was one of the most obvious ways in which people differ. Like modern evolutionary psychologists, Freud recognized the need to provide a biological expla- nation of social behaviour. His explanation for the money motive was, characteristically, developmental. He suggested that psychological involvement with money must start with its most familiar form, coins, and that inter- est in these must derive by displacement from interest in faeces. Thus, for Freud, and for later psychoanalysts like Ferenczi (1914/1976) who developed Freud’s ideas, the different individual behaviours and attitudes towards money, from the miser’s hoarding to the spendthrift’s self-destructive carelessness, represented varieties of anal eroticism. This is a basic Drug Theory: money acts on the developing human brain in the same way as Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug 3.3. Money in other social sciences 3.3.1. Classic sociology of money. The classic social science view of money was shaped by Marx (1867/1932, vol. 1, Chs. 1 –3) and Weber (1904/1976, Ch. 5). Both linked the psychology of money to the capitalist mode of economic production. In Marx’s view, tradable economic commodities are the products of human labour appearing as “independent beings endowed with life” (Marx 1867/ 1932, vol. 1, Ch. 1, sect. 4) through a process he describes as “commodity fetishism,” in which certain compelling images come to eclipse the objects they portray. The conversion of labour into money requires a double trans- formation (Ch. 3, sect. 2), and therefore a double alien- ation (of labour into the commodity produced, and of the commodity into money). For Marx, this abstraction, or alienation, of perceived value from its origins in human labour is a necessary step in the historical develop- ment of a modern capitalist economy. Although lacking technical psychological input, Marx’s account is plainly a theory about the psychology of money, and in our terms it is a clear example of a Drug Theory; a “fetish” is a very reasonable description of a “functionless motivation,” and incorporates well the notion of deception that is at the core of the drug metaphor. Weber also saw the accumu- lation of money as essential to the development of capital- ism, though in his account accumulation flows not from desire, but from the paradoxical way in which Protestant- ism equated working at worldly callings with virtue while disallowing consumption. This view leads to a Drug Theory more by default: since the tool use of money is disallowed, money can only be sought for its own sake, even though, as Weber recognised, it is not within human nature to do so (cf. Needleman 1994, pp. 143 –44). These classical views are capable of wider application than the specific economic historical settings in which Marx and Weber deployed them. The idea of commodity fetishism continues to be used in modern sociological and anthropological analyses (e.g., Carruthers & Babb 1996; Desforges 2001; Snodgrass 2002), and the Protes- tant Ethic has acquired new significance in the psycho- metric analysis of behaviour towards money (Furnham 1990). But long before the recent period, a wider view of the sociology of money had been taken by Simmel (1900/1978) in his major work, Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money). Simmel explored “just about every conceivable topic connected to money” (Deflem 2003). He agreed with Marx in seeing money as an instru- ment of alienation, but he did not see it solely in the context of the emergence of capitalism. For Simmel, it is money itself, not capitalism, that transforms goods into commodities. Money is both the means and the symbol of the process by which in modern society impersonal, quantitative social relations between autonomous individ- uals replace the determinant relations imposed by traditional society. Simmel was specific about money motivation: normally money is not a purpose in itself, but it has infinite capacities of application in exchange relations, and so it becomes desired for itself. In our terms, we can see here both an assertion of Tool Theory and an assertion of its inadequacy, and the need for some kind of Drug Theory. This is most obvious in the extreme case: “For the miser, all other goods lie at the periphery of existence and from each of them a straight BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 167 that its representation by a commodity is merely contin- gent; for him, money stuff always symbolises abstract money. But he is at one with Zelizer and other sociologists of money in rejecting the simple economic view that “money is what money does.” From a different back- ground comes the striking hypothesis of Seaford (2004) that it was the invention of coinage that enabled pre- Socratic Greek metaphysicians to conceive of impersonal universal forces: on this view, money can actually be said to give birth to abstract symbolic thought (see also Shell 1982). The sense that money is essentially a symbol, perhaps multiply symbolic (cf. Lea et al. 1987, Ch. 12), seems hard to reconcile with any kind of biological analysis of money motivation; it leads, furthermore, to a cognitive rather than a motivational analysis of behaviour towards money. We will return later (sect. 5.2) to the question of whether there is a fundamental conflict between this kind of social-cognitive theory of money and our attempt to construct a biological account. Within the confines of our current account, however, we need to classify the modern sociological theories. Clearly they go beyond the simple notion of money as a tool for economic exchange, but they do not align in an obvious way with what we have called Drug Theory. Rather, modern sociology tends to see money as a tool, but as a tool for more than exchange, and, as we have already noted, that idea is expli- cit in several modern social accounts of money function; see, for example, Buchan (1997). In the final section of this target article (sect. 5.2), however, we shall argue instead that the modern sociological account should be classified as a Drug Theory, because its conclusions paral- lel those of the specific version of Drug Theory we develop there. At this point, we merely note that if money is sought for the meanings it carries, that allows for a disconnection between those meanings and the reality that is believed to underlie them, and thus creates an opening for the decep- tive processes that characterize Drug Theories. 3.4. Summary This brief survey has shown that a number of leading the- ories of money in psychology and other social sciences are, in terms of the metaphorical dichotomy we have drawn up, best classified as Drug Theories. However, we have not found a simple economics versus psychology opposition. Surprisingly, the most conservative economic theory of money (metallism) appears to be a Drug Theory, while at least one much-used psychological theory is clearly of the Tool Theory type, and modern sociological approaches may be best described as “sophisticated tool” theories. t pervading 4. The empirical psychology of money the recog- Modern approaches to the psychology of money have been strongly affected by the emergence of the specialised sub- disciplines of economic psychology and behavioural econ- omics. A number of lines of investigation have proved fruitful within the empirical economic psychology of money, and these shed some light on the issue of Tool Theory versus Drug Theory. Several of them overlap with recent empirical work in the sociology and anthropol- ogy of money. Not surprisingly, these lines of investigation Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug Money illusion disconnects the psychological impact of money from what money can do. Shafir et al. (1997) argue that the disconnection is only partial, and that money illu- sion in fact arises from people’s struggles to work with both real and nominal values. But even a partial disconnection of the motive for money from its instrumental effect is evi- dence that a pure Tool Theory cannot be adequate. 4.3. Money conservatism People frequently resist new forms of money, even when the innovation is quite trivial. When the U.K. pound note was replaced by a coin in 1983, reaction in the press was absurdly hostile; and Hussein (1985) showed experimentally that people did indeed behave differently with the coins, spending them more quickly than notes. In the United States, the introduction of the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin in 1979 largely failed because of public rejection (Caskey & St. Laurent 1994). Current attempts to introduce a dollar coin are again meeting with hostility and very low levels of usage; the coins barely circulate, except for a few special purposes such as the purchase of subway tickets in slot machines, while dollar bills remain in widespread use. The reaction against the euro in countries such as the United Kingdom (see Routh & Burgoyne 1998) is similarly dispro- portionate to any economic facts. Indeed, people are more agreed about their dislike of the euro than they are about the reasons for that dislike, a strong indication that their hostility is rationalised rather than rational. That is not to say, of course, that it is unreasonable: the euro is recogni- sable as both a means and a symbol in the ongoing project of “Europeanization” (Borneman & Fowler 1997) to which many people in the United Kingdom remain opposed. Its rejection is the rejection of an institution that is literally foreign to them, and thus incapable of supporting the trust that money is required to elicit. At first sight, money conservatism seems to give strong support to a Drug Theory. However, it is not an unlimited phenomenon, and its limitations tend to support a Tool Theory. Caskey and St Laurent (1994) produce an entirely instrumental analysis of the rejection of the U.S. dollar coins. When currencies lose their value because of econ- omic or political change, people lose interest in them pre- cipitately, as a Tool Theory would predict. Furthermore, not all new forms of money are rejected. Credit and debit cards have won wide acceptance quite quickly, though penetration varies greatly between countries (Humphrey 2004; Snellman et al. 2001). Nevertheless, some of the phenomena of money conservatism do seem to call for a Drug Theory. The loss of interest in super- seded forms of money is rarely total. Anecdotes of people hanging on “irrationally” to foreign or devalued currencies are common, suggesting that money does not lose quite all its power when it loses its function. Further- more, although dramatic devaluations certainly do cause people to lose confidence in a particular currency, they have much less effect on people’s confidence in money in general. The high inflation that has characterised many Latin American and African countries for decades has certainly caused their citizens to lose interest in acquir- ing their local currencies, but they remain very interested in acquiring dollars (e.g., De Boeck 1998; Guidotti & Rodriguez 1992). The collapse of the rouble following BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 169 of technology. But money is, specifically, a tool for exchan- ging. Any limitation on its exchangeability is a restriction on its tool use. Economic psychologists have shown that money in modern society, like primitive money, has restrictions on its use, particularly in connection with gifts. In Britain, young adults do not feel it is appropriate to use money as a gift for their mothers (Webley et al. 1983), and identifiable social rules prohibit or allow using money as a Christmas gift, depending on the relationship, and relative age and status of the giver and recipient (Burgoyne & Routh 1991; Webley & Wilson 1989). For example, the person giving money as a gift must be of higher status, if only by virtue of being older (cf. Motel & Szydlik 1999). Furthermore, the evaluation of gifts, whether by the giver or the receiver, does not depend only on their monetary value (Pieters & Robben 1999). A related phenomenon is the partial taboo on the use of money to repay neighbourly help (Webley & Lea 1993a). These particular social rules are not universal: there are cultures where to give money is a sign of respect (e.g., in Ghana: van der Geest 1997) or is socially required in certain contexts (e.g., in Cyprus: Hussein 1985). Whatever form it takes, however, there is a general tendency to maintain a distinction between market exchanges (where money is acceptable and usually required) and gift exchanges (where money may not be acceptable), to the point where some market- motivated exchanges may be given the outward form of gifts in order to appropriate a different social meaning (Offer 1997). A second sphere where money is often an unacceptable medium of exchange is within sexual relationships. Historically, cultures have generally provided ways of legitimising the exchange of money or money’s worth for sexual access, whether through bride price, bride service, or the convention that husbands should be the “breadwinners” for their wives and families. But it is not socially acceptable for the exchange to be made too starkly, or in other than the conventional forms: to do so incurs the stigma of prostitution. The exchange has to be cast within the rhetoric of gifts and giving rather than as payment. Millman (1991) argues that this social conven- tion acts to mask the real financial exchanges that do take place within close relationships and are exposed when relationships break down. Simpson (1997) takes a slightly different position, arguing that on relationship breakdown there is a shift of transactions from the non- monetised gift sphere to the monetised sphere, and this causes many extra difficulties between divorcing couples – even as they seek that shift to symbolise the social distance that now exists between them. Zelizer (1996) has documented some of the ways in which people in Western cultures try to keep spheres of exchange distinct, using sex as a leading example; Wojcicki (2002) describes the ways in which South African women, with a very different cultural background, camouflage money-for-sex exchanges as social relationships; and Knauft (1997) reviews how the monetisation of extra- marital affairs in both Amazonia and Melanesia has resulted in increasing stigma for the women involved. Converging evidence for the convention of separating sexual from monetary exchanges comes from situations where the monetisation of the transaction is actually sought, precisely because it removes sexual acts from any Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug as a neutral medium of exchange, ways we sometimes want to avoid. It might be argued that the restrictions on money use can also be reconciled with a Tool Theory by taking the tool metaphor more seriously and pointing out that tools do not have to be universally useful. But the problem with exchanging money for sex, for example, is not that it cannot be done, but that it is not socially acceptable for it to be done because the effects of doing it are socially and psychologically destructive. It appears that money exchanges have side effects, and that these give it drug qualities. good” that is 4.6. Money in relationships Sociologists and psychologists have shown that money often has as a special status within relationships and a special impact on them (e.g., Burgoyne 1990; Millman 1991; Pahl 1989; 1995; Simpson 1997). Within families, access to and influence over money is rarely distributed equally, and this inequality is frequently a focus for dissa- tisfaction, strain, and dispute. Money issues are reliable predictors of divorce (Amato & Rogers 1997), and as Millman has shown, divorce courts (and also courts adjudicating disputed wills) provide many illustrations of the money problems that arise in close relationships. Family financial disputes are not only about money. In part, they are about the real power that money gives to buy real goods and services, and in part they are about more general issues of freedom and constraint within the relationship (Vogler 1998). But they are also about money as such. Disputes about money within the family can concern the distribution of limited financial resources (e.g., Zelizer 1994), but they can also be triggered when one partner acquires new resources, disrupting the pre- vious distribution of power. James et al. (1992) recorded how some wives of unemployed men in Britain withdrew from the labour market to avoid the marital strain that went with their acquiring the powerful position of the major earner. Money is a potent symbol and channel of the power relationships within a family, and because this is a direct impact of money rather than one mediated through what money can buy, we argue that it has a strongly drug-like quality. 4.7. Sacred and profane uses of money The most systematic recent approach to the psychology of and therefore money is that of Belk and Wallendorf (1990). Using anthropological data, they draw a distinction between “sacred” and “profane” uses of money. In many ways this parallels our distinction between Drug Theory and Tool Theory. Belk and Wallendorf’s profane uses are the mundane, functional uses of money that fit easily into a Tool Theory. But they put forward the hypothesis that even modern money can be sacralized precisely in order to explain “some of the more puzzling ways in which people behave towards money.” Among such money puzzles they include the social bar on the direct use of money to buy slaves, brides, political office, or children; the distinction made between earned and unearned income; the restrictions on the use of money as gifts; gender and class differences in the uses of money; and the paradoxes and contradictions in the ethics of money use. In sections 4.4 to 4.6, we construed many of the BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:2 171 ambiguities that this produces in the lives of low-paid Brazilian bank employees, who face deteriorating pay and conditions under circumstances where the money they are processing is increasingly powerful. Given the contradictions inherent in their situation, it is not surpris- ing that he found the Marxian concept of money fetishism useful in describing their psychological processes. More commonly, people’s work has a direct financial dimension which can be given more or less psychological promi- nence. Schweingruber and Berns (2003) have analysed the behaviour and attitudes of U.S. students recruited as door-to-door commission booksellers, and show how they had to both involve themselves in and distance them- selves from the financial rewards that would be associated with a successful sale. The idea of money acquired an almost magical content for them. extended con- views of 4.10. Money addiction If money is to be thought of as a drug, we might expect to find addictive processes associated with it, though evi- dently they would constitute a “non-substance addiction” in the same way as compulsive gambling. The concept of non-substance addiction remains controversial, but it has been widely used. The idea of money addiction has been put forward to explain some of the oddities of people’s financial behaviour (Boundy 1993; Cameron & Bryan 1992; Forman 1987; Goldberg & Lewis 1978; Needleman 1994, e.g., pp. 115ff; Slater 1980). Most of these sources are popular or semi-popular rather than academic, and the idea of money addiction has found little use in soci- ology or clinical psychology. Furthermore, many of the references to it in fact deal with more specific addictions or supposed addictions, such as “workaholism” (Harpaz & Snir 2003), compulsive gambling (Dickerson 1984), or compulsive buying (Black 1996). It is an interesting possi- bility that all these are manifestations of a broader addic- tion to money, but there is as yet no evidence to support that proposition; and given our interest in understanding the motivation to acquire money as such, rather than the things that it can buy, compulsions to spend in various ways are not relevant to our argument. Slater (1980) did consider one case that is more specifi- cally relevant to our argument: the hoarding of money per se, or miserliness. Hoarding in Slater’s sense is distinct from the accumulation of money for precautionary or investment purposes, though of course it is possible that at the mechanistic level there is overlap between these motivations, or indeed the many other recognised motives for saving (see Lea et al. 1987, Ch. 8). As we have seen in section 3.2.1, miserliness was historically a particular concern of psychoanalysts. Clinical and psycho- metric work gives some support to the Freudian notion that miserliness and hoarding are components of obses- sive-compulsive disorder, and both seem to have some connection to compulsive shopping (Frost et al. 2002; Grilo 2004). As such, there does seem to be some support for a Drug Theory of money motivation from the evidence on money pathology. More recent clinical psychological approaches, such as cognitive behaviour therapy, have also been applied to money pathologies, and as these too would see the pathological interest in money as disproportionate the money’s actual usefulness, they would also favour a Drug over a Tool account. Lea & Webley: Money as tool, money as drug users (Card et al. 1983) because it relies on recognition rather than recall memory. The good tool always comes with overtones of drug, whether it is a tool for data proces- sing or exchanging. Thus we argue that, though money certainly is a tool, it is too successful a tool for the Tool Theory to be entirely right. But the Drug Theory is not without problems. First, the phenomena that we have identified as requiring some kind of Drug Theory are not a coherent set. They could easily be regarded as a mixed bag of marginal, second-order phenomena that all have different explanations. This argu- ment, however, only carries force if we are implicitly per- suaded that Tool Theory must be the correct explanation for most money motivation. If Drug Theory covers any phenomena at all, then it may also cover some of the phenomena that could be accommodated by a Tool Theory. It need not be confined to the margins. More seriously, Drug Theory is feeble unless we can specify what the natural incentives are that money mimics, and in this final section we therefore seek to do that. For convenience, we refer to the incentive systems concerned as “instincts,” though, as explained in section 1.4, we mean that term only in the sense of a motivational system so widely observed that it can be taken to be cultu- rally universal, like hunger or parenting. Those examples are sufficient to remind us that even when motivations are universal, the way they are manifested varies greatly between cultures and periods of history. Here, we suggest two motives that we believe are universal among humans, and argue that they manifest themselves in modern cultures as a desire for money. These are certainly not the only possibilities, but we are seeking to establish that there is at least some plausible means by which the drug-like effects of money could have evolved. 5.2. Reciprocal altruism, trade, and money A prime use of money, considered as a tool, is to facilitate trade. Could trade itself be the incentive that money mimics? At first this seems an unhelpful suggestion, since it simply moves the problem from the evolutionary origin of money to the evolutionary origins of trade, which is also a uniquely human behaviour (see Lea 1994). Division of labour occurs in other species, but there is little doubt that its integration into a system of trade is uniquely human; chimpanzees may be induced to barter in the lab- oratory (Hyatt & Hopkins 1998), but there is no evidence that trade forms any part of their natural social life. The problem of the evolution of a motivation for trade, however, may be tractable in a way that the problem of the evolution of a money motive is not. Ridley (1997, Ch. 10) has argued, from the archaeological evidence, that though trade originates with Homo sapiens, it must have done so early, in fact it must be as old as the species itself; he sees trade as one of the distinguishing marks of our species. So, whereas the use of money is too recent

Lea & Webley BBS (2006) Money as Tool, Money as Drug PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue