TMRE 2008 Speaker Featured in New York Magazine

Kathleen Vohs, PhD is featured in this week's cover story "Recession Culture" in New York Magazine.

From the article, It turns out there are people who study our brains on money. Kathleen Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, is preeminent among them, and for the sake of better understanding both the past and the future of our city, it's useful to start by looking at what she's found. Just thinking about money made her subjects less likely to help strangers struggling with their belongings. Just handling money made her subjects less sensitive to physical pain. My favorite experiment of hers, though, was one in which she divided her subjects into groups, one of which stared at a screensaver of floating dollar bills and another at a screensaver of exotic fish. Subjects were then asked whether they'd like to work on a task alone or with a partner. Eighty percent of those who'd been staring at the dollar bills chose to work alone. Eighty percent of those who'd been staring at the fish wanted to collaborate. (One wonders if the offices of AIG couldn't have benefited from an aquarium or two.)

For the entire article, please click here.

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