Social Ties and Money Priming in Bargaining Games and the Prisoner's Dilemma

The authors examine the effects of money priming and solidarity on individual behavior in three simple games: dictator, ultimatum, and prisoner's dilemma game. In three consecutive experiments, they use two different money treatments and two neutral (control) treatments. Additionally, they vary the strength of social ties between participants by conducting experiments with students from a military university and a regular university. Although the priming procedure is sufficient to remind people of the concept of money, it is not sufficient to induce systematically different behavior of the treatment groups compared to the control groups. They find significant differences between groups with strong and weak social ties, even without activating the idea of group affiliation. They discuss various explanations of why the results seem to contradict previous research on money priming.