Does Money Make You Mean

Unit Four: Lab Questions

Does Money Make You Mean?

1. How did the study organizers fix the game of Monopoly to ensure certain players win?

There’s more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources are given to players.

2. What were the results of the experiment?

The rich player started moving around the board louder, signs of dominance showed in the richer player. The rich player ate the bowl of pretzels more rapidly than the regular player. The rich players started to become ruder towards the other player, and became very cocky and vain.

3. What do the experimenters conclude based on this study and others?

Some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status, and a lot of people don’t. As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement and their ideology of self-interest, increases. Wealthier individuals are more likely to moralize that greed is good.

4. What are the implications these conclusions hold for our society?

It kills the American dream and builds the negative stereotype of rich people. Also, America is looked at as a melting pot, but if a huge part of this country are unaccepting and rarely compassionate, can that nickname hold true.

5. How do the conclusions from this experiment make you feel?

It makes me upset and disappointed in our country and the upper class status. This video, although stuffed with facts, creates a bias and identifies a stereotype in many people’s heads.

Could Your Language Affect Your Ability to Save Money? <- your second lab link

1. What must country commit to in order to become a part of the Organization of Economic Cooperation?

They affirmed a common commitment to democracy, open markets, and free trade.

2. How does one's language force a person to think about time?

In the English language a speaker would have to consider the past, present, and future, putting more thought into time. The Chinese language does not divide time the way that the English language does. While speaking the Chinese language, as speaker is forced to think more about family.

3. How does this difference in language relate to our propensity to save?

If you are separating time into past, present, and future, you are thinking about the future as a something far away and distant, therefore decreasing your propensity to save. If you speak a futureless language, you will speak about time identically meaning you will feel as they are identical, it increases your propensity to save.

4. What experiments did Chen carry out to come up with these conclusions?

There are pockets of futureless language speakers situated all over the world. When you look into the data, these pockets of futureless language speakers turn out to be some of the world’s best savers.

5. Did anything surprise you about this video? Why or why not?

At first, I was surprised about the comparisons between time and saving money, but once speaker broke down languages into sections, future and futureless, it became very clear why English speakers have little propensity to save because of the divisions of time.