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The effect of thinking of money on social distance: The moderating role of subjective socioeconomic status

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Abstract

Building on recent literature, we examined whether subjective socioeconomic status moderated the impact of money priming on social distance. After manipulating the concept of money, participants indicated their social distance from others on a figure-based scale and evaluated their subjective SES on the MacArthur Ladder scale. Results showed that money priming significantly decreased the perceived social distance among people with lower subjective SES. The findings suggest that subjective SES differentially modulates the effect of money priming on the perception of social distance. This pattern in people with a lower level of subjective SES may stem from their perception of thinking money as a threat.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Humanity and Social Science Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China [18YJC880021]. We thank Liwen Gao, Dongling Li, and Sijing Zou for helping collect data. We also would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments in revising this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Wuming He.

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The procedure performed in this study involving human participants was in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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He, W. The effect of thinking of money on social distance: The moderating role of subjective socioeconomic status. Curr Psychol 40, 2786–2790 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00219-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00219-8

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