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Not $s, but Euros were used to evaluate the relationship
between how our
wants of money and food. "In Study 3, participants' desire
for money
affected the amount of M&M's they ate in a subsequent taste
test, but
only among participants who were not restricting their food
intake in order
to manage their weight."

Briers B, Pandelaere M, Dewitte S, Warlop L.
Hungry for money: the desire for caloric resources increases
the desire for
financial resources and vice versa.
Psychol Sci. 2006 Nov;17(11):939-43.
PMID: 17176423

This report attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation
for humans'
motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We
propose that
people's desire for money is a modern derivate of their
desire for food. In
three studies, we show the reciprocal association between
the incentive
value of food and of money. In Study 1, hungry participants
were less likely
than satiated participants to donate to charity. In Study 2,
participants in
a room with an olfactory food cue, known to increase the
desire to eat,
offered less money in a give-some game compared with
participants in a room
free of scent. In Study 3, participants' desire for money
affected the
amount of M&M's((R)) they ate in a subsequent taste test,
but only among
participants who were not restricting their food intake in
order to manage
their weight.

... Sixty-two undergraduates (20 men) received euro7 in
return for their
participation. Half the respondents were asked to imagine
winning euro25,000
in the lottery (high-desire-for-money condition), whereas
the other half
imagined winning euro25 (low-desire-for-money condition).
All participants
were instructed to make a list of all the things they would
dream of buying
if they won the specified amount.

We had pretested this lottery manipulation, relying on
Bruner and Goodman's
(1947) finding that the value attributed to money can
interfere with normal
perceptual processing. Given that people with a high desire
for money (e.g.,
poor children) overestimate the size of coins relative to
people with a
lower desire for money (e.g., rich children), we
hypothesized that the
estimated size of euro coins would be larger among
participants in the
euro25,000 condition than among participants in the euro25
condition. After
listing what they would buy if they won the lottery, 38
pretest participants
were asked to identify which of seven coin sizes (ranging
from 92.5% to
107.5% of the actual size, with the fourth option being the
true coin size)
was the actual size for each of five coins (euro0.10,
euro0.20, euro0.50,
euro1, and euro2). The average estimated coin size (on a
scale from 1 to 7)
was larger in the high-desire-for-money condition than in the
low-desire-for-money condition (high desire: M = 3.50; low
desire: M =
2.99), t(36) = 2.04, p = .049, ?p2=.10.

In the actual experiment, after the lottery scenario,
participants' mood was
measured using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule
(PANAS; Watson,
Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Subsequently, participants were
instructed to
complete the taste test. They were given two bowls
containing the same
volume of food, one containing regular M&M's (400 g), and
the other
containing the new crispy M&M's (300 g). Participants were
told that they
were participating in a comparative taste test of M&M's.
They were allowed
to eat as many M&M's as necessary to evaluate them on
several dimensions
(e.g., "Are they crunchy?"). Quantity consumed was measured
unobtrusively.
As in Study 2, time since the last meal was recorded to
control for
nonexperimental variation in hunger. Participants then
received the Dutch
Questionnaire of Eating Behavior (van Strien, Frijters,
Bergers, & Defares,
1986), which measures the extent to which people restrain
their food intake
in order to lose, or not gain, weight. Participants were
classified as
restrained (n = 26) if their score on this scale exceeded
2.8 (i.e., the
sample median).

Results

An analysis of variance with desire for money and restraint
as the
independent variables and time since the last meal and
gender as control
variables revealed a significant main effect of desire for
money, F(1, 56) =
7.07, prep = .95, ?p2=.11. This main effect was qualified by
an interaction
with restraint, F(1, 56) = 3.98, prep = .88, ?p2=.066.
Planned comparisons
revealed that the unrestrained participants ate more M&M's
in the
high-desire-for-money condition than in the
low-desire-for-money condition
(high desire: M = 38 g; low desire: M = 18 g), F(1, 32) =
8.47, prep = .96,
?p2=.21. The lottery manipulation did not affect the amount
consumed by the
restrained participants (high desire: M = 23 g; low desire:
M = 21 g), F(1,
22)< 1, n.s. In addition, males ate more than females, F(1,
56) = 5.61, prep
= .927, ?p2=.091, and consumption decreased with increasing
time since the
last meal, F(1, 56) = 4.87, prep = .908, ?p2=.080. Probably
participants did
not want to spoil their appetites before an upcoming meal.

The effects of desire for money were not mediated by mood.
First, the
desire-for-money manipulation influenced neither positive
mood (? = .77; F <
1) nor negative mood (? = .81; F < 1). Second, neither
positive mood (F < 1)
nor negative mood (F < 1) affected the amount of M&M's consumed.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

These three studies show a symmetric relation between the
incentive value of
food and the incentive value of money. In Study 1, hungry
participants were
less likely to donate to charity than satiated participants.
In Study 2, an
olfactory food cue, known to increase the desire to eat,
made participants
offer less money in a give-some game compared with
participants in a room
without this scent. In Study 3, participants' desire for
money affected the
amount of M&M's they ate in a subsequent taste test, but
only among
participants who were not restricting their food intake. We
propose that
people's desire for money relies on the human adaptation to
collect food.

To our knowledge, we are the first to test the psychological
link between
money and food empirically. According to Gurven (2004),
evolutionary
psychologists and economists should be careful in
generalizing their
findings from monetary economic games to nonmarket
situations and in drawing
conclusions about the evolutionary origins of cooperation on
the basis of
lab experiments involving money. Part of our contribution,
therefore, is
providing support to evolutionary psychologists' assumption
that findings
involving money are informative about findings involving
food, and vice
versa. Our results may also provide a partial explanation
for Nelson and
Morrison's (2005) finding that both financial and caloric
deprivation among
men appear to be related to what is considered the ideal
female body weight.
The preference of low-income men for heavier women, as well
as the
acceptability of a larger body size for lower-income women
than for
higher-income women, for example, might be well predicted
from our findings.

An area for future research is the overlap in neurological
activation due to
desire for money, on the one hand, and desire for food, on
the other hand.
The emerging evidence that these two reward systems share a
brain region
(e.g., Breiter et al., 2001; O'Doherty et al., 2002) raises
the question of
the extent to which this region is involved in the
processing of all kinds
of rewards (Montague & Berns, 2002; Wilson & Daly, 2004).
For example,
neural evidence suggests that the same dopaminergic reward
circuitry in the
midbrain is activated for a wide variety of reinforcers,
including
attractive faces (Aharon et al., 2001), funny cartoons
(Mobbs, Greicius,
Abdel-Azim, Menon, & Reiss, 2003), cultural objects such as
sports cars
(Erk, Spitzer, Wunderlich, Galley, & Walter, 2002), drugs
(Schultz, 2002),
and money (Breiter et al., 2001).

The idea that many rewards are processed similarly in the
brain has
important implications for economics, which assumes that the
marginal
utility of money depends on what money buys. Our findings
suggest that money
becomes a primary reinforcer, which means that people value
money without
carefully computing what they plan to buy with it. The
emerging area of
neuroeconomics suggests the possibility that the value of
money is only
loosely linked to consumption utility (Camerer et al.,
2005). This
possibility is further supported by the noteworthy parallels
between
findings in the literature on money and the literature on
food. The tool
theory of money (Lea & Webley, 2006) and set-point theory of
food (Pinel,
Assanand, & Lehman, 2000) both consider the reinforcer on
which they focus,
money or food, to be instrumental: Money is viewed as a
means to obtain
biologically relevant incentives, and food is viewed as a
means of
preventing the body's energy resources from falling below an
energy set
point. However, several findings are inconsistent with both
instrumental
theories. Bruner and Goodman (1947) found that children
overestimate the
size of coins relative to other stimuli; thus, the value
people place on
money apparently interferes with their perception of
currency. Likewise,
people not only eat to restore their energy level, but also
eat because of
the anticipated pleasure of eating. The more recently
advanced drug theory
of money (Lea & Webley, 2006) and positive-incentive theory
of food (Pinel
et al., 2000) can account for these findings, as in these
theories, money
and food have value beyond their instrumentality.

Finally, the symmetric association between food and money
may help explain
why poor people are especially vulnerable to overeating and
have ill health
as a result. In industrialized countries such as the United
States
(Drewnowski & Specter, 2004), as well as in developing
countries (James,
2004), obesity is usually associated with poverty. Perhaps
in present-day
societies, the attraction to money is so powerful that
people who,
relatively speaking, fail in their quest for (more) money
become frustrated.
Accordingly, as financial and caloric resources are
exchangeable, they might
tend to appease their desire for money by consuming more
calories than is
healthy.