Do subtle reminders of money change people's political views?

Abstract

A number of researchers have reported studies showing that subtle reminders of money can alter behaviors and beliefs that are seemingly unrelated to money. In 1 set of studies published in this journal, Caruso, Vohs, Baxter, and Waytz (2013) found that incidental exposures to money led subjects to indicate greater support for inequality, socioeconomic differences, group-based discrimination, and free market economies. We conducted high-powered replication attempts of these 4 money priming effects and found no evidence of priming (weighted Cohen's d = 0.03). We later learned that Caruso et al. also found several null effects in their line of research that were not reported in the original article. In addition, the money priming effect observed in the first study of Caruso et al. was included in the Many Labs Replication Project (Klein et al., 2014), and only 1 of the 36 labs was able to find the effect.