Money Elevates The Sense Of Control

Money plays crucial part in human’s life. Individuals use money to acquire goods and service to meet daily demand. The psychological effect of money now is one of the hot spot in social psychology, produce a series of influential findings. Among them, social resource theory attracts the most attention. In social resource theory’s point of view, money is a valid social resource to maintain and elevate living standard, to solve problems in case of losing control. The sense of control defined as the perception of how much one can affect outcomes, have close connection with money.So far, research have done a lot on the relationship between money and well-being and the sense of control abroad. However, rarely Chinese researcher have studied money using money-prime technique. In order to fill the gap, this paper adopt money-prime technique to exam money’s impact on the sense of control based on social resource theory which would contributes to the growing body of money psychology and psychological counseling. Using two experiments, this paper aims at disclosing the relationship between money and the sense of control. Experiment1using descrambling task to prime money and create a baseline, to exam money or neutral prime’s influence on the sense of control; Experiment2ask participants to recall a past experience to manipulate the sense of control, and exam after changing the level of personal control, individual’s visual perception for money and willing to own big money in exchange of giving up important things in life. The study shows:1. Compared to neutral prime, participants in money-prime possess higher sense of control.2. After reducing personal control, individual shows greater desire for money, manifested as perceiving coins into bigger size, willing to abandon important things in order to receive a big amount of money.3. Individual with different SES have different desire for money. Participants from low SES perceived larger coins than itself, participants from high SES willing to give up important things in exchange of a big amount of money.The study indicates money is a valid social resource which could elevate the sense of control, and individuals with different SES hold distinct implicit attitude towards money which probably come from the impact of the sense of control. This study disclose the psychological effect of money and the relationship between money and the sense of control, providing social resource theory with new evidence. Future study should aim at adding up personal characteristics and numbers of participants in order to find out the complicate relation between money and the sense of control. Beside, whether emotional factor could affect SES’s relation with implicit attitude worth exploring.