Conscious and Unconscious Influences of Money: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

The Psychological Science of Money

“…While money has various uses (e.g., a store of value, a means of exchange, a unit of account), all these uses can be argued to be instrumental-i.e., like a hammer helps people to drive nails in the wall, money helps people to obtain the goods that they need and want. Recent work on this instrumental perspective of money has provided many new insights into the way the human mind and brain process money-related stimuli-e.g., with regard to how money affects performance via conscious and unconscious processes (Capa & Custers, 2014 ), to how money is evaluated during decision making (Buechel & Morewedge, 2014 ), to how fi nancial decision making changes with age (Samanez-Larkin, Hagen, & Weiner, 2014 ), and with regard to what neural circuitry is involved in the processing of money (Krug & Braver, 2014 ).…”

“…Whereas Capa and Custers ( 2014 ) and Buechel and Morewedge ( 2014 ) zoom in to micro-level time courses that play out over seconds at most, Samanez-Larkin et al ( 2014 , Chap. 6 ) examine how the processing of monetary gains and losses changes over the course of an adult life.…”

“…In behavioral experiments, particularly in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the incentive conditions are usually explicitly cued for participants prior to or at the start of the task trial. However, there is also growing evidence that suggests implicit or subliminal reward cues can also be quite effective, particularly at increasing task effort Bijleveld, Custers, & Aarts, 2012 ;Capa & Custers, 2014 ). In some cases subliminal cues may be even more effective than supraliminally presented cues, depending on the nature of the cognitive task and when (during the duration of the task trial) the cues are presented (Zedelius, Veling, & Aarts, 2011 ).…”

“…Thus, while subliminal cues are thought to induce a general increase in effort, supraliminal cues can evoke conscious processing of the cue, rumination and implementation of specifi c strategies, which may or may not result in improvements in task performance (Bijleveld et al, 2012 ;Capa & Custers, 2014 ;Zedelius et al, 2011 ). Taken together, these results suggest the importance of delving more deeply into the mechanisms by which motivational incentives exert their infl uence on specifi c cognitive processes, which has led to greater interest in cognitive neuroscience-based research approaches.…”

Effort responses to suboptimal reward cues are related to striatal dopaminergic functioning

“…Using behavioral paradigms, though, a considerable number of studies have found reliable effects of suboptimal reward cues on effortful behavior (see for an overview Capa and Custers 2013 ). Although the effects on task performance are often similar to those generated by optimal reward cues (e.g., Bijleveld et al 2009 ), recently researchers have started to study the circumstances under which the effects of optimal and suboptimal reward cues diverge.…”