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Are You Lecturing on the Psychology of Money? |
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Posted by: | Ryan T. Howell |
Title/Position: | Associate Professor |
School/Organization: | San Francisco State University |
Sent to listserv of: | SPSP, SESP |
Date posted: | February 19th, 2013 |
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Hello Colleagues,
Last year about this time I wrote everyone to introduce you to our academic website BeyondThePurchase.Org. Now, I want to announce we have developed studies that allow professors to introduce consumer psychology, the psychology of money, and positive psychology to their students through our interactive website. If you will be lecturing on: (1) the effects of money primes on attitudes and behavior, (2) the psychological benefits of experiential buying, or (3) measuring happiness, personality traits, or values you can introduce these topics by having your students first take some of our studies. After students complete any survey or study, they receive personalized feedback and learn more about the psychological construct measured or manipulated.
For example, if you are discussing how the mere exposure to money effects your attitudes and behavior, we have a between-groups study which primes half of the participant's with phrases that make them think about money--then all participants complete the Fair Market Ideology scale. This study is modeled on work done by Eugene M. Caruso, Brittani Baxter, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Adam Waytz (2012). On the feedback page we teach students about how thought about money, as suggested by previous research, makes people more likely to support free-market systems and believe they are fair.
If you will be lecturing about the psychological benefits of experiential consumption, we have added a within-groups study where participants reflect on both a material and experiential purchase (counter-balanced to control for order-effects) and answer questions about how the purchase improved their lives. On the feedback page we teach students that that spending money on experiences makes people happier and contributes more to overall life satisfaction.
Finally, if you are discussing topics like survey construction and usability, construct validity, or external validity, you can have students take any survey from out happiness and well-being surveys and have a class discussion. On each of these feedback pages we teach students how to interpret their scores on subjective well-being surveys.
If you are interested in using BeyondThePurchase.Org in your classroom, please email me back at rhowell@sfsue.edu and we can discuss how we could make this easy for you and your students. Also, if you are interested, we can develop an individualized link for your students so we can segment the data and provide you with de-identified data set for your student to examine in the class.
Finally, if you have either a simple survey or a simple between or within (two-group / conditions only) study you would like to add to BtP, we are open to collaborating with you. So far we have collaborated with two other faculty members with great success.
Cheers,
Ryan
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Ryan T. Howell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Psychology Department
San Francisco State University
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