Modern Values - Unit 8

C1 Advanced · Gapped Text · Ready for C1 Advanced 4th Edition, Macmillan Education

You are going to read part of an article about the psychological effect that money has on our behaviour. Six paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from paragraphs A–G the one which fits each gap (1–6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Modern Values

Mark Buchanan asks whether the desire for money and status has increased in modern times, and if so, what might be driving it?

The study findings seemed to confirm that this is the case. Subjects were less likely to donate to charity on an empty stomach than a full one, and those instructed to dream about a big lottery win went on to consume the most in a taste test.

This seems all the stranger when you consider what money is supposed to be: a medium of exchange making economic life more efficient. Just as an axe allows us to chop down trees, money allows us to have markets that, traditional economists tell us, dispassionately set the price of anything from a loaf of bread to a painting by Picasso.

Then there are those who almost do the opposite, maxing out their credit cards as they relish the thrill of spending money on new clothes, eating out and so on. Research shows their brains react to money as they would to a drug.

In order to do this, people need to balance the pursuit of extrinsic aspirations such as wealth and fame, with the pursuit of intrinsic ones, such as building and maintaining relationships.

The researchers noted that the subjects who had been given the latter set then worked on the difficult main task for a very long time before asking for help. The same subjects were also unwilling to assist anyone else with the task.

Offering to pay your mother-in-law after she has cooked you a nice meal would be equally inappropriate. ‘When we keep social norms and market norms on separate paths, life hums along pretty well,’ says the professor. ‘But when they collide, trouble sets in.’

On the one hand we have ‘warm and fuzzy’ social standards of behaviour to conform to, designed to foster trust and cooperation and long-term relationships which are mutually beneficial.

Cash, currency, greenbacks, dosh. Just words, you might say, but they carry a weird psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments and you will become a different person, according to one recent US study which found that simply thinking about money makes people less inclined to help or cooperate with others.

Yet the evidence shows that money is a very different tool altogether, stirring up stress and envy and other strong emotions. And of course, not everyone will treat money in the same way. Some people, for example, will become addicted to accumulating it, secure in the thought they have enough put away for a rainy day. They see money as a surrogate friend, offering reassurance about the future.

So, while some economists would have us believe that it is merely a means of transaction, we can see from those two groups that money exerts a powerful psychological force over us. In fact, some psychologists have been testing the theory that our emotional response to money is biologically driven. Professor Barbara Briers is one of them. She decided to test whether our appetite for cash is directly related to our appetite for food, in an attempt to provide an evolutionary explanation for our motivation to strive for money in present-day societies.

Briers reckons this indicates that our brain processes ideas about money using the same pathways evolved to think about food, so that in our minds the two are synonymous. Professor Daniel Ariely of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts the influence of evolution, but is also looking at the influence of the 21st century. He suggests that modern society now presents us with two distinct sets of rules – making our attitude to money even more complex.

Then there is a set of market norms – the principles that apply in business situations. These revolve around money and competition, and encourage individuals to put their own interests first. This ability to assess which set of norms applies in a particular situation is important in guiding our behaviour, Ariely says. It allows us to avoid making foolish mistakes – expecting too much trust in the midst of a competitive business negotiation, for example.

This doesn’t seem to happen very often because we recognise the cues associated with the realm of market norms, as demonstrated in a recent experiment carried out by Professor Kathleen Vohs and colleagues at the University of Minnesota. The team got student volunteers to complete a challenging activity in which they had to arrange a series of discs into two patterns. But before doing this, they were split into two teams. The first was asked to make sensible phrases from a group of words unconnected to money (such as ‘cold’, ‘desk’ and ‘outside’) and the other team made phrases from a group of words that were money-related (including ‘salary’, ‘cost’ and ‘paying’).

Vohs suggests there is a simple dynamic at work here. ‘Money makes people feel self-sufficient,’ she says. ‘They are more likely to put forth effort to attain personal goals, and they also prefer to be separate from others.’ The touchy-feely side of us may disapprove of such behaviour, but it is useful for survival.

Cash, currency, greenbacks, dosh. Just words, you might say, but they carry a weird psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments and you will become a different person, according to one recent US study which found that simply thinking about money makes people less inclined to help or cooperate with others. ___ Yet the evidence shows that money is a very different tool altogether, stirring up stress and envy and other strong emotions. And of course, not everyone will treat money in the same way. Some people, for example, will become addicted to accumulating it, secure in the thought they have enough put away for a rainy day. They see money as a surrogate friend, offering reassurance about the future. ___ So, while some economists would have us believe that it is merely a means of transaction, we can see from those two groups that money exerts a powerful psychological force over us. In fact, some psychologists have been testing the theory that our emotional response to money is biologically driven. Professor Barbara Briers is one of them. She decided to test whether our appetite for cash is directly related to our appetite for food, in an attempt to provide an evolutionary explanation for our motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. ___ Briers reckons this indicates that our brain processes ideas about money using the same pathways evolved to think about food, so that in our minds the two are synonymous. Professor Daniel Ariely of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts the influence of evolution, but is also looking at the influence of the 21st century. He suggests that modern society now presents us with two distinct sets of rules – making our attitude to money even more complex. ___ Then there is a set of market norms – the principles that apply in business situations. These revolve around money and competition, and encourage individuals to put their own interests first. This ability to assess which set of norms applies in a particular situation is important in guiding our behaviour, Ariely says. It allows us to avoid making foolish mistakes – expecting too much trust in the midst of a competitive business negotiation, for example. ___ This doesn’t seem to happen very often because we recognise the cues associated with the realm of market norms, as demonstrated in a recent experiment carried out by Professor Kathleen Vohs and colleagues at the University of Minnesota. The team got student volunteers to complete a challenging activity in which they had to arrange a series of discs into two patterns. But before doing this, they were split into two teams. The first was asked to make sensible phrases from a group of words unconnected to money (such as ‘cold’, ‘desk’ and ‘outside’) and the other team made phrases from a group of words that were money-related (including ‘salary’, ‘cost’ and ‘paying’). ___ Vohs suggests there is a simple dynamic at work here. ‘Money makes people feel self-sufficient,’ she says. ‘They are more likely to put forth effort to attain personal goals, and they also prefer to be separate from others.’ The touchy-feely side of us may disapprove of such behaviour, but it is useful for survival.

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