Topic > Money and Morality - 907

Money is defined as a medium of exchange; is any confirmable document or item that can be used for the purchase or sale of goods and services. Recent research suggests that money itself can corrupt; people often act immorally to acquire it. Gino and Mogilner (2014) conducted four-experiment research that focused on time, a ubiquitous presence in people's lives, to offset the harmful effects of money. According to their results, it can be seen that money priming encourages unethical behavior and, conversely, time priming discourages it. Furthermore, Gino and Mogilner suggest that implicitly activating the conception of time reduces the rate of cheating behavior by causing people to engage in self-reflection. However, other research states that the condition where time is limited must be taken into consideration for the study; participants' choices are different, so the “priming time” study may not be accurate; the study on money priming neglects the existence of moral people. Therefore, the link shown between time, money and morality by Gino and Mogilner (2014) may not be applicable as priming has limitations. In contrast to Gino and Mogilner's (2014) time prime study, Jones (1991) found a relationship between deliberation time and moral judgment. When people feel limited in time, they may act less ethically. Because gathering facts requires time and energy to make moral judgments, having more time to make a decision could discourage unethical behavior, decrease the incentive to cheat, and increase moral awareness. Jones is not the only one to investigate the relationship between time and moral judgment, in a study by Suter and Hertwig (2011), 67 psychology students were randomly assigned to the no-time condition... ....le people feel limited in time, act less ethically. The second limitation is that the participants are different and do not experience the same social stimulus, so the results are not too applicable to real-world scenarios. For example, a longer time for moral judgment leads to less ethical decisions (Zhong et al., 2010). The third limitation is that money research neglects the existence of moral people. Although people committed to donating wealth to charity may be limited, there are still a number of people willing to donate money to charitable activities, when charity is involved in the prominent situation of money (Sanghera, 2011). Although Gino and Mogilner (2014) have convincingly demonstrated that the link between time, money, and morality has important applications, the three limitations indicated limit the usefulness and applicability to real-world scenarios.