Okay, so I lied about this being a blog primarily about linguistics. In truth, I have no real plan of where I am going with it exactly (this is also true for my life). But I do have some ideas. I grudgingly ended up paying $70 to upgrade Word Press because the free version wouldn’t allow me to change from the default font, a font that could possibly (absolutely) generate the same cult-hatred which exists for Comic Sans. For the record I’ve never been overly adverse to Comic Sans. Every time I come across it, I get some warm and fuzzy nostalgia about Microsoft 95, floppy disks, slide transitions and the unhelpful paperclip. However, my point being, having forked out some hard, cold cash I guess I have one more year of blog entries.
Now that I have started talking about semantics, every word/metaphor/idiom I use feels like my own little personal joke. Like the idiom- cold, hard cash– what makes cash cold and hard? Why does the order always have to be cold, hard cash and not hard, cold cash. Granted word order in idioms is almost always crucial. Cold and hard do have tangible associations with money, coins can be both hard and cold. Maybe so can credit cards? A hard wad of notes? I guess it would hurt if someone threw a soprano-like stack of cash in your face.
Historically it looks like it has something to do with merchants in the 1600s (PRI), where the phrase can be traced to the desire for hard cash or hard money in exchange for goods (and maybe instead of exchanging your first-born daughter for some livestock and 3 acres, you wanted some cold, hard cash). But did merchants really use the word cash? I don’t know about this one internet article I sourced: https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/why-we-say-cold-hard-cash. You should read it actually- it goes on to talk about the psychological effects of handling physical money!
Okay, so the word cash was circulating around the 16th century. Something to do with Middle French and their caisse ‘box’, which came from the Old Italian cassa ‘money box’, originating from what you might say is a godfather of languages, the Latin word capsa meaning ‘box’. You had a big box to keep your money in because internet banking didn’t come into conception till the golden era of the early 2000s, duh.
Cold, hard cash doesn’t only represent some of the physical aspects of money, but is also associated with a sense of immediacy. You want the money right now and you’re not waiting for a check to clear. Maybe it’s hard to conceptualise a time when money wasn’t just an instant wave of the phone to a tiny little square! (I wonder how the Square stocks are doing.) What Mental Floss (the linked article above) suggests is that there is a psychological link between the cold physical feature of money and a kind of bystander effect. Except instead of responsibility to help a stranger being diffused by a crowd- the cold hard money in your hand translates to a cold dead heart. Maybe that was a bit dramatic. Surprisingly, this study was very easy to find as Mental Floss referenced it in another related article. Luckily with my increasing HECS debt and unrelenting studies I have free access to the article! So let me summarise some research.
Reutner et al. (2015) postulates that money is linked to social coldness. This is a different study (also cited by Mental Floss) centred on the conjecture that “the metaphor of social coldness is bodily grounded and thus linked to actual sensations of physical coldness”. Their hypothesis? Based on the evidence that the metaphor of money is related social coldness, this figurative coldness will mean individuals will feel physically cold . It ties to theories around embodiment which, simply put, posits that our sensorimotor experiences are integrated with and influence our psychological processes.
They conducted an experiment where participants had to guess the room
temperature after putting their hand in a jar of money. It used a
between-group design, with participants randomly assigned to either the
control or experimental group. The control group had their hand in a jar
containing 97 paper pieces resembling banknotes, while the experimental
group had a jar filled with actual money (97 banknotes or $1300). In both groups, participants guessed the amount in the jar, other measurements around the room, and the room’s temperature, the dependent variable.
There were 40 participants in this experiment (32 female, 8 men). They completed the task for course credit. Receiving course credit, coupled with the skew in gender, undoubtedly means that they were psychology students. After all it is the humble psychology student who has inadvertently become the most studied demographic in the field (but I’ll talk about that another time). Look, this really isn’t a huge sample size and the fact that there is such an uneven distribution in gender is problematic. But adequately powering a study (that is, recruiting lots of people to do your stupid experiment) is usually constrained by resources i.e. time and money. So be skeptical of research, especially psychology research, which is currently in a replication crisis. However, this doesn’t mean it should be completely discounted.
What did the study find? That participants in the experimental condition (jar of money) had significantly lower estimates of room temperature. Importantly this effect was only evident for temperature and not the other estimates- which is interesting! It might be diligent to note that the researchers attempt to control for other unwanted variables, like individual core temperatures, by measuring body temperatures at the start of the experiment. However it’s unclear 1) if there were any significant differences in body temperature, 2) what they did to mitigate any potential differences and 3) how individual body temperature might influence estimates.
They did do another experiment in this study but if I have to write anything more about it, I’ll never finish this stupid blog. I also want to add I was not intending to include any of this research, but here we are, and now I feel like I’m writing a lit review (BORING). The show must go on.
So let’s talk about the other study (Guéguen & Jacob, 2013), the one were people aren’t helpful to strangers after they withdraw a stack of cash from the ATM. This is the key take from the research and nicely summarised in the title of the paper: Behavioral consequences of money: When the automated teller machine reduces helping behavior. It’s one of those exciting psychology field experiments done in a naturalistic setting and not inside the lab. 150 participants (random pedestrians, even distribution of gender) were selected, half of which used a nearby ATM (experimental condition) and half walked by the ATM (control condition). Two experiments were conducted, with 100 participants assigned to one and 50 to the other. Experiment 1) they were asked by a female confederate to complete a short survey and in experiment 2) the confederate ‘unknowingly’ drops a bus pass near the participant. The dependent variable being the number of times help was offered to the confederate.
Results: Experiment 1) 17/50 (34%) in the experimental condition offered help, compared to the control condition 31/50 (62%). For experiment 2) 15/25 (60%) in the experimental condition offered help, compared to 24/25 (94%) offering help in the control condition.
Problems with the study: 1) Authors state when approaching participants to be involved “precautions were taken to solicit participants in both conditions with the same apparent characteristics: age, gender, style of dress, race, etc.” Firstly, how do they define style of dress? This seems like a very subjective inclusion criteria. Do they mean class? Secondly, all psychological research must be done according to some ethical guidelines. This would be procuring permission from the participant to use their data and some form debrief after the experiment. However, ethical considerations and participant permission isn’t mentioned once in the article. So let’s speculate, perhaps they actually completed this task using 200 participants and post-experiment (in the debrief) gathered people’s demographics and matched their characteristics (“age and etc”) accordingly. Perhaps they disregarded participants that couldn’t be matched, because how you would be sure of someone’s age and race by looking at them? You would also want to know why they chose to omit these certain data points. This is entirely hypothetical because I cannot see how the data can be unbiased if you’re picking candidates solely on how they look. Also, generally, research strives for randomly selected population samples? It seems the Guéguen and Jacob were trying to control for age and socio-economic variables but introduced a wealth of other potential biases. Without disclosure of their full methodology it’s impossible to know. Thirdly, yes there is more, as highlighted in the paper using the same female confederate for the experiments has some issues. What differences would be introduced if the confederate was male presenting? Did the confederate (even though she did not know the goal of the study) unconsciously act differently in each experiment?
So there is some research! Thank god that’s over (it was exhausting) and I can start talking about words, banks and money again. Wait have I started talking about banks yet? Before I get back to it, can you see how research can be unintentionally misleading? It would be nice to move away from broad, sweeping generalisations because they don’t really exist. This isn’t to say I don’t believe there is a correlation between handling money and temporarily turning into a sociopath- I absolutely do!
Things I was going to talk about before I got distracted:
a) Why are idioms important when trying to understand categorisation and meaning in both linguistics and cognitive psychology.
b) Paper money and inflation.
c) Coming full circle to talk about why fractional reserve banking is bad, which I made a little joke about in my first blog.
d) Other more abstract idioms like, when pigs fly, which is apparently an adynaton.
e) Gold Standard, how this idiom originated from gold standard banking (when money was valued in reference to gold).
f) Metaphor of time is money.
g) Concepts and categories: Necessary and sufficient features.
h) Forked out: A history of the phrasal verb.
K) What was banking like in the 16th century though?
Future topics (possibly):
Why do people hate Comic Sans ?
Bad at English, how many colons (:) is too many?
Embodiment theory.
References
Guéguen, N., & Jacob, C. (2013). Behavioral consequences of money: When the automated teller machine reduces helping behavior. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 47, 103–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2013.09.004
Reutner, L., Hansen, J., & Greifeneder, R. (2015). The Cold Heart. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(5), 490–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550615574005
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