Money Priming and Social Behavior of Natural Groups in Simple Bargaining and Dilemma Experiments

We examine the effects of money priming and solidarity on individual behavior in three simple experiments: dictator game, ultimatum game, and prisoner's dilemma. Our study comprises two money treatments and two neutral (control) treatments. Additionally, we control for the strength of social ties between experimental participants. Although our 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. We find significant differences between groups with strong and weak social ties, even without activating the idea of group affiliation. We discuss various explanations why our money priming results contradict previous research