Methods
Participants
Fifty-three individuals (53% male; Mage = 25, SD = 9.2) participated
in the study. Most participants (64%) were students from local
universities in a city in the northeastern United States.
Design and procedure
Study 1 was conducted in two adjacent classrooms of a university
in the northeastern United States. In the hall outside the classrooms,
participants were randomly assigned to a room and thus to
one of two conditions: the wealthy condition (N = 27) or the poor
condition (N = 26). A female experimenter was responsible for
the poor condition, and a second female experimenter of about
the same age was in charge of the wealthy condition.
We manipulated perceptions of wealth by varying the amount
of money in the cash piles from which we distributed payments
in each of the two rooms. In each classroom, the cash was located
on a table in the center of the room, clearly visible to all participants.
In both conditions, as participants entered the classroom,
they passed the table with the money and the experimenter,
who was standing close to the table, handed them each a stack
of 24 one-dollar bills. In the wealthy condition, this money was
distributed from a large pile of cash placed on two different tables
(about $7000 in real $1 bills; see Fig. 1 for photographs). In the
poor condition, only the cash necessary to pay participants was
on the table. After passing by the money, participants sat at individual
desks that were situated such that they could not see each
other’s answers.
Once participants were seated, the experimenter read the
instructions aloud. As the instructions explained, participants were
asked to create words using a set of seven letters and to list them in
the workbook they had received. Participants were told that to ensure
anonymity, at the end of the study they would record the
number of words they had created on the answer sheet placed
on their desk. The answer sheet asked participants to report the
number of valid words they created in each round. Participants
were also told that, at the end of the study, they would put the
workbook in a sealed box at the front of the room and turn in their
answer sheet to the experimenter.