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Across five studies, the current research demonstrates that imbuing money with humanlike characteristics can enhance charitable giving. Based on mind perception theory, we propose that anthropomorphizing money can induce people to attribute to money the capacity to feel and sense (i.e. warmth) and the capacity to do things (i.e. competence). Further, we argue that enhanced warmth perception increases charitable giving. Studies 1a and 1b provided initial evidence that money anthropomorphism increased charitable giving by measuring real monetary donation behavior (study 1a) and by adopting a practical method to anthropomorphize money in charitable appeals (study 1b). Study 2 showed that money anthropomorphism enhanced both warmth and competence perceptions of money, but that only enhanced warmth perception increased donation intention. Study 3 showed that money anthropomorphism did not enhance other types of charitable giving, such as signature provision. Study 4 showed that the money anthropomorphism effect was unique to money and that anthropomorphizing other financial instruments, such as a credit card, did not induce the same effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essential characteristic of marketing practice and theory is the promotion of exchanges, many of which are funded by money. Marketing literature thus places great emphasis on determining what factors influence consumers to engage in the marketplace. Less understood, however, is how consumers allocate monetary resources to fund exchanges. Scholars have demonstrated that people employ earmarks to segregate money by source, meaning, or purpose. The ethnographic study of provisioning in the current research adds to prior scholarship with an explanation of how money, as a fungible resource, is transformed into moral and social resources by the behavioral process of ascribing earmarks and approaching provisioning. As part of this study, the author develops a typology that incorporates thrift provisioning and splurge provisioning approaches to categorize consumer goals derived from the use of prosaic and indexical earmarks. These goals are defined as economizing, sustaining, treating, and rewarding. The article closes with a discussion of implications for marketing managers and potential avenues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract: Drawing on social comparison and equity theories, we investigated the role that perceived similarity of a comparison target plays in how resentful people feel about their relative financial status. In Study 1, participants tended to choose a comparison target who was better off, and they selected a target they perceived to be more similar than dissimilar along dimensions that surrounded their financial outcomes. In Study 1, perceived relative disadvantage was positively associated with resentment regardless of the perceived similarity of the comparison target. The results of Studies 2 to 5b clarified these findings by showing that being both similar and dissimilar to a target can cause resentment depending on the context. Using hypothetical and real social comparisons, we found that people are more dissatisfied with their financial outcomes when their comparative targets have the same background qualifications (i.e., are similar) but are financially better off (Studies 2, 3b, 4, and 5b). However, we also found that when the comparative financial contexts were similar (i.e., equal affluence), participants were more dissatisfied when their target for comparison had lower qualifications (i.e., was dissimilar; Studies 2, 3a, 4, and 5a). In all cases, perceptions of unfairness mediated the effects of social comparison on financial dissatisfaction. Taken together, these studies address some of the ambiguities around what it means to be similar to a target in the context of social comparisons of affluence, and they underscore the importance of perceived unfairness in the link between social comparison and resentment with one's financial status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges Tony Lawson's claim ( Lawson, 2016) that his ontology of money as the 'social positioning' of 'prior value' is more sustainable than prominent existing theories and is able therefore to reconcile their putative incompatibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various challenges to the classical view of money as primarily a quantitative medium that contributes to the spread of a calculative attitude in our relations. Often associated with Georg Simmel and other social thinkers such as Weber, this somewhat dystopian view of money has more recently been given fresh impetus by a number of ‘post-crash’ publications that cast money as a root cause of increasing debt, greed, and irresponsible banking. Against this, I argue for a more nuanced, qualitatively rich perspective on money, one that is evident in this collection, which undertakes what might be called a ‘qualitative’ analysis of money’s quantitative features. This special issue presents an approach to money that treats it as a pluralistic phenomenon, with many different sides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks a definition of money by bringing the approaches of Spengler, Plato, Aristotle, and Keynes into dialogue. All four promote alternative views of the ontology of money as anchored either in supra-individual thought or in actual behavior, scrutinizing its relationship with mathematics. This discussion leads to an understanding of money as originating in human action and as a numerical tool that can only be understood from its ends in use. The essence of money is therefore ethical. The article concludes with a novel combination of Aristotle’s and Keynes’s ideas: the crucial element of money is learning good money practices in order to form society. This can be achieved by harmonizing money’s material part as mere actuality with money’s mathematical part as potentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how money’s quantity is enacted as multiple in Kaleko, a small market center in Western Kenya. Residents of Kaleko conceptualize money’s quantity as abstracting, concretizing, and recursive. Theorizing this ethnographic data allows us to understand money as a sign that stands against itself. The abstracting and concretizing properties of money’s quantity symbolize what it means to be coerced to do something, while its recursive property symbolizes what it means to act freely. The article scrutinizes how money’s recursive quantity thereby relates to one peculiar trait of free social encounters in Kaleko: it suspends the distinction between part and whole with the help of ‘combinatory practices’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies related to the meanings of money have shown empirically its multidimensional character. Despite the social relevance of the subject there has been only few publications related to it. Thus in this article we descried the main findings and the meanings of money in different aspects: conceptual, theoretical (levels of analysis) and methodological (operational). We use data from publications from 2000-2014 found in indexed databases. From these we have identified three levels of analysis (intraindividual, interindividual-social and ideological), predominance of the use of structured questionnaires and participants with a university background as well as an emphasis to identify the meanings attributed to money. We discussed the need for more integrative explanatory models that consider the various contexts from which such meanings emerge, as well as the development of research that addresses the applicability of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Money norms present a fundamental contradiction. Norms embody the social sphere, a system of internalized values, unwritten rules, and shared expectations that informally govern human behavior. Money, on the other hand, evokes the economic sphere of markets, prices, and incentives. Existing legal scholarship keeps the two spheres distinct. Money is assumed to operate as a medium of exchange or as a tool for altering the payoffs of different actions. When used to make good behavior less costly and undesirable behavior more costly, money functions to incentivize, sanction, and deter. Although a rich literature on the expressive function of law exists, legal scholars have generally confined money to the economic sphere of sanctions and subsidies. This Article attempts to bridge that gap. Money elicits a strong, visceral, and emotional reaction, triggering (and creating expectations of) selfishness, individualism, and self-reliance that is unaccounted for in current legal scholarship. Money norms not only insulate our moral values from market encroachment, but they also prescribe modes of behavior that encourage cooperation and counteract the impulse to act selfishly. The Article sets out a framework for understanding the interrelationship of money norms and the law in an effort to enhance the effectiveness of existing incentive structures. It suggests that legal efforts to influence money norms may be more successful in the context of morally ambiguous norms where noncompliance is both easier to rationalize and less likely to be socially condemned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose an overall model of the semantic and semiotic functions of money and capital forms, based on an ecological view of human activity and a theory of the origin of money (coined precious metals). The meaning of money is replaced in a structured human perspective, and a critical discussion is outlined on the grounds of the material and capital flows and functions identified. The madness of money follows from the separation of economy and ecology. That madness causes serious damage, especially under certain circumstances that the structural analysis can identify. Finally I add some new considerations on the psycho-semiotic implications of the analysis. The societal structure discussed can be interpreted in terms that have strikingly direct correspondence to those describing semiotic aspects of language and the human psyché, where the concepts of meaning and madness are immediately pertinent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers servant and slave runaway advertisements as a qualitative rather than quantitative source focusing less, as others have, on the fugitives’ agency, and more on their commodification as laborers and its relationship to the rise of print culture and paper money. I am concerned in particular with the payment of rewards and what they signified of the runaways’ relation to wider colonial society. Rewards were introduced in the mid-seventeenth century by public authorities and were payable in fixed amounts and stipulated commodity monies. These early settlement measures treated runaways as a social and disciplinary challenge to the common good. Thus, the earliest use of rewards developed within a publicly administered framework of corporate priorities and obligations and produced mixed results. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the use of printed newspaper notices transformed the pursuit of runaways into a public and private endeavor, enhancing established institutions and processes in the service of individual interests and market-oriented ends. Most important, private notices offered monetary rewards to potential pursuers and thus an assurance that their efforts would be recompensed in negotiable currency. In so doing, newspaper notices and rewards stigmatized runaway servants and enslaved workers in ways that fostered a sense of their alterity and subordination within civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though the question on the need to reinforce the social dimension of the European project is definitely not a new one, the hard economic readjustments, the current political crisis and the growing disaffection amongst citizens towards the EU have rekindled the debate and require today an urgent response from the Union, which is today immersed in a deep reflection on its future and on the possibility of creating a Social Pillar. After a first analysis of the progressive evolution of the Union's social acquis, as well as of the European social rights and their limits, this paper will examine the different alternatives that are available for Europe to go further in the social field, either at the general EU-wide level or at the particular range of the European Economic and Monetary Union; assuming that the establishment of a European social model is a necessary and inevitable step to restore citizens' confidence in the integration project and to make Europe a real welfare state and an authentic social market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Money has become increasingly important in China since the transfer from a planned to a market economy. This study investigated whether the increased normative importance of money impairs Chinese adolescents' self-esteem. National survey data from 11,819 adolescents (mean age, 14.29 years; 48 % girls) in 200 junior high schools in China were used to examine whether school-level importance of money was associated with self-esteem, and how adolescents' family income and gender modified this association. Multilevel structure equation modeling analysis indicated that school-level importance of money was significantly and negatively related to individual students' self-esteem after controlling for school- and individual-level family incomes. The negative effect of school-level average importance of money on self-esteem varied with Chinese adolescents' subjective, but not objective, family income. Adolescents whose parents subjectively perceived that their families were poorer than others were more vulnerable to the negative effect of school-level average importance of money. No gender difference in susceptibility to the school-level average importance of money was observed. These findings suggest that Chinese adolescents' self-esteem is contingent on social standards about money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having a longitudinal approach of the Romanian public accounting system’s evolution, this historical study proposes the development of a framework in order to assess in a descriptive manner the change of public accounting and its implications for Romania, a European emerging country. The evolution from cash accounting to accrual accounting took place during three time periods within the timeframe 1991–2015. For each of these time periods we investigated influential factors such as period, place, people, practices, propagation, products, and profession. The study shows that under the influence of the international managerial public reform and the internal factors analysed, the public accounting system shifts from the old values of the post-communist period to new reference bases such as International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS). The results of the study place Romania, an East European country, on the map of international public sector accounting systems as a relatively new arrival but with serious intentions of integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the development of ubiquitous technologies that support the digitization of money, research is needed on how individuals' private life practices are affected by new technological financial systems and how cash-based practices can inform their design. In this article, we report the cash-based monetary practices of one Ethiopian rural community and identify their implications for the design of new financial technology. Particularly, we focus on addressing the question, What characteristic features should go into the design of mobile money application(s) to embody a rural Ethiopian community's money practices in social (marriage and death) and religious contexts? Primary data on everyday practices of the community were collected. Analysis of our data reveals that new financial technology design should support lived experiences such as embedded social meaning, segregated and aggregate money control, restricted money use, identity extension and hiding, refusal and acceptance of donations, disclosed and secret money practices, and assigning aesthetics to money. The article concludes by discussing possible ways of mapping these concepts into financial system design, thus contributing toward the development of cashless transactions and a cashless society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of the nature of money is pursued drawing on results generated in the field of social ontology as well as on observations from history. The conception of the nature of money found in this manner to be the most sustainable is compared to various other prominent, if usually held to be mutually incompatible, theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four studies show that moral identity reduces people's aversion to giving time--particularly as the psychological costs of doing so increase. In Study 1, we demonstrate that even when the cost of time and money are held equivalent, a moral cue enhances the expected self-expressivity of giving time--especially when it is given to a moral cause. We found that a moral cue reduces time aversion even when giving time was perceived to be unpleasant (Study 2), or when the time to be given was otherwise seen to be scarce (Study 3). Study 4 builds on these studies by examining actual giving while accounting for the real costs of time. In this study, we found that the chronic salience of moral identity serves as a buffer to time aversion, specifically as giving time becomes increasingly costly. These findings are discussed in terms of the time-versus-money literature and the identity literature. We also discuss policy implications for prosocial cause initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People can get most of their needs broadly satisfied in two ways: by close communal ties and by dealings with people in the marketplace. These modes of relating--termed communal and market--often necessitate qualitatively different motives, behaviors, and mind-sets. We reasoned that activating market mode would produce behaviors consistent with it and impair behaviors consistent with communal mode. In a series of experiments, money--the market-mode cue--was presented to Polish children ages 3 to 6. We measured communal behavior by prosocial helpfulness and generosity and measured market behavior by performance and effort. Results showed that handling money (compared with other objects) increased laborious effort and reduced helpfulness and generosity. The effects of money primes were not due to the children's mood, liking for money, or task engagement. This work is the first to demonstrate that young children tacitly understand market mode and also understand that money is a cue to shift into it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research report revisits Keith Hart's work on the mutual implication of token and commodity theories of money, focusing on his classic Malinowski lecture on the coin's two sides. Hart associates 'heads' with political authority and token theories and 'tails' with quantitative value, market exchange and commodity theories. Yet, even as he argues for the necessity of a rapprochement between the intellectual approaches delimited by the coin's two sides, the coin conceit as he elaborates it is unprepared to deal with the quotidian intermixing of 'heads' and 'tails' one encounters in actual rather than theoretical coinage. Starting from the problems posed by actual coins to the apparent clarities of Hart's coin, this essay argues that on a material, micro-level the relationships between state power and market exchange on the one hand and 'heads' and 'tails' on the other are rather more contingent in practice than in theory. On this level, actually-existing forms of Western money are only poorly parsed by the 'sidedness' of the coin conceit. The a priori divisions between power and quantification, symbols and amounts, as well as their topological mapping onto discretely divided material surfaces freighted in the virtualism of 'heads' and 'tails' are a poor fit with complex amalgams of numbers, power, states, symbols and exchange we may read off the surfaces of particular coins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research report examines the relationship between promissory acts and promissory notes in Kenyan history and its popular imagination. In Jomo Kenyatta's classic ethnography of the Kikuyu, Facing Mount Kenya, he decries the corrosive power of money to corrupt the ritual techniques used to guarantee the honesty of elders in customary legal tribunals. However, at the advent of monetary independence from the East African shilling in 1966, Kenyatta seemed to have undergone something of a modification in his monetary thinking. Kenya's new currency was emblazoned with Kenyatta's own image as if to suggest that he himself backed its stability and capacity to ensure social reproduction. If we are to take seriously Keith Hart's observation that money always has two sides, heads and tails, representing both the authority of the state and a commodity with a price, what might the iconography of Kenya's new money tell us about Kenyan notions of trust and value that were grafted onto the nation-state form in 1966? This paper argues that Kenyatta's money attempted to suture gerontocratic authority to the quantitative value of the money form. In this respect, Kenyatta established a political tradition in which leaders attempted to embody the logic of the general equivalent itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about the nature and origin of the social foundations of money can have no closure. There is a range of credible, but sometimes inconsistent, positions. This paper conjectures that the framing of debates is itself precluding the recognition that these ‘foundations’ are themselves conjuncturally specific. At critical historical points of monetary crisis or innovation, it is the divergence between theories that gives analytical potence, for it reveals different aspects of social instability and change. Hence, the paper frames theories of the social foundations of money as presenting ‘ontological spreads’ which are generally quite narrow but widen at critical times when the social foundations of money show instability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I consider how descriptions of finance since the 2007–2008 credit crisis have offered a new template of representation for value and its changing valences, both theoretical and aesthetic. My particular concern is social scientific writing about the crisis that might be grouped loosely under the rubric of ‘performativity’, namely the argument that models (or representations, either mathematic or linguistic) produce markets, and that markets are best studied through ethnographic observation. I ask why language, performance and metaphor itself – what was once the province of a more literary tradition – have become a methodological tool for social scientists now in their particular investigations of finance. I suggest that a more complete analysis of finance may be located if economic performativity and aesthetic theories of performance are brought into dialogue. In part one, I read the ethnographic work of Donald MacKenzie, most centrally, as well as that of Janet Roitman, both of whom have isolated some literary problem of the economy: performativity and narrative, respectively. In the second section, I look at a series of artists and theorists of performance who might be understood to offer a critique of the relationship between language, money and performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current literature shows that both absolute and relative income are important for happiness, but there is little work emphasising how the strength of the relationship is dependent on personal and social factors. I hypothesise that social connectedness influences the money-happiness relationship because the effect of money is in part felt through the acquisition of social status, whereas status (and associated psychological benefits such as self-worth) can alternatively be gained through social connectedness. In particular, it is theorised that 'weak ties' when co-existing with good quality informal ties have a separable and additional benefit to subjective well-being, and that it is the socially isolated who have the most to gain from doing well financially. Social connectedness is conceptualised as a 'resilience resource' which has a buffering effect on subjective well-being. Data from the British Household Panel Survey are used, first to establish a measurement schema of connectedness using latent class analysis, and secondly in a multilevel model of life satisfaction with observations from seven consecutive years nested within individuals. The results show that connectedness makes a larger difference to satisfaction in times of financial stress, and that the satisfaction of the socially isolated can 'catch up' to some degree with those with larger networks when things are going well financially. The findings also confirm that those for whom money makes the smallest contribution to happiness are those with both strong and weak ties. Weak ties have an additional benefit compared to having strong ties alone. In summary, connectedness has the power to narrow the well-being gap that exists between times of financial struggle and times of relative comfort. It suggests that the psychological benefits of social integration have the capacity to displace money as a source of status and self-worth, and similarly that the importance of money may be exaggerated where these psychological gains are not available through other domains of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is premised on the assumption that scholarly studies on al-Māl (money) and its role in human-lives have largely been seen to be the exclusive preserve of social science scholars. This has consequently led to the elision of other perspectives, particularly the cultural, on the category. This paper therefore attempts to fill that gap. It begins with a review of the literal meanings of al-Māl in Muslim and non-Muslim cultures, the jurisprudential construction of the concept and insightful perspectives from, among others, C. Turner, W. Muhammad and M. Plessner. Using works of Abī Tayyib al-Mutannabī and Ahmad Shawqī as cultural sites, the paper subsequently anchors its discussion of humanity's notions of money on three axes: money as a necessity, money as a sociological referent and money as the essence of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I read the television shows The Sopranos and Breaking Bad to explore how an illegitimate economy represents a legitimate one. I argue that what holds these shows together in some proto-generic organization is that money functions as both a criminal outside to capital and a structural assertion that capital has no outside. Thus I claim that capital is best represented by its own double, that legitimate enterprise is best represented by illegitimate enterprise, but that representation is only efficacious because ultimately there is no capitalist activity that, for the right price, cannot become legitimate. I suggest we might best see fiction itself as a kind of liquidity, one of the forms that circulating capital takes, and thus representation and the potential for accumulation become theoretical cognates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the book "The Social Life of Money" by Nigel Dodd is presented.

A literary criticism of the book "The Social Life of Money" by Nigel Dodd is presented.

A literary criticism of the book "The Social Life of Money" by Nigel Dodd is presented.

A literary criticism of the book "The Social Life of Money" by Nigel Dodd is presented.

We propose that a focus on new money increases forgiveness of others. Three studies provided consistent support for our hypothesis. Working adults recalled an interpersonal offense by a colleague and were subsequently induced to think of either new or used banknotes. Thinking of new (vs. used) banknotes led to weaker destructive tendencies toward the offender (Study 1), more pro-relationship thinking (Study 2), and higher forgiveness (Study 3). This effect was mediated by feelings of vitality (Study 3), indicating a strength-based mechanism. We discuss implications for research on money, forgiveness, self-regulation, and organizational behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The 2001-2002 Argentine financial crisis entailed a dramatic currency devaluation. I argue that the devalued peso served as a key site for self-reflexive national critiques, which circulated as a privileged currency of middle-class distinction. This essay engages with the ambivalences of a world of critical practice in which practitioners framed their own critiques as the compulsory labor of a people trapped by a paradoxical monetary reality, posited as socially constructed yet nonetheless inescapable. Tracing the links among disparate modes of signification and evaluation, the essay sketches a post-crisis, middle-class representational economy predicated on these practices of suspicious interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a typical laboratory 'Investment Game' experiment, participants' endowments are provided by the experimenter; thus, the worst case for the investor is that she loses all of her 'found' money. By contrast, in naturally occurring environments, investment decisions can often lead to a loss of one's own money. This paper investigates whether 'trust' found in one-shot anonymous laboratory interaction is robust to 'own money' environments. Our results show that, consistent with previous investment game results, most investors send a positive amount, and most trustees return at least the transfer amount, regardless of whether the investors purchase or are gifted their endowment. However, investments are on average lower when participants use their own money, and the fraction of maximum investments (the most 'risky' investment decision) is only half as large under 'own money' as it is under gifted endowments. Our results explain why one should exercise caution in placing trust in any government's ability to spend other people's money prudently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines dealing with money as a social and cultural form of dealing with the self and with others. Based on empirical case studies from the discipline of European Ethnology, money and consumption are contextualized as a means of self-positioning between frugality and generosity, biographical self-emancipation, and social inclusion and exclusion. The examples have one aim: by deconstructing economic practices, the economy as such can be ‚anthropologized‘ (Paul Rabinow), i.e. stripped off its allegedly self-evident universal claim and revealed in all its culturally and historically specific functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This meta-analysis investigates the relationship between individuals' materialistic orientation and thenpersonal well-being. Theoretical approaches in psychology agree that prioritizing money and associated aims is negatively associated with individuals' well-being but differ in their implications for whether this is invariably the case. To address these and other questions, we examined 753 effect sizes from 259 independent samples. Materialism was associated with significantly lower well-being for the most widely used, multifaceted measures (materialist values and beliefs, r = -.1 9 , p = -.2 4 ; relative importance of materialist goals, r = -.16, p = -.21), more than for measures assessing emphasis on money alone (rs = -.08 to -.11, ps = -.0 9 to -.14). The relationship also depended on type of well-being outcome, with largest effects for risky health and consumer behaviors and for negative self-appraisals (rs = -.2 8 to -.4 4 , ps = - .3 2 to -.5 3 ) and weakest effects for life satisfaction and negative affect (rs = -.1 3 to -.1 5 , ps = -.1 7 to -.18). Moderator analyses revealed that the strength of the effect depended on certain demographic factors (gender and age), on value context (study/work environments that support materialistic values and cultures that emphasize affective autonomy), and on cultural economic indicators (economic growth and wealth differentials). Mediation analyses suggested that the negative link may be explained by poor psychological need satisfaction. We discuss implications for the measurement of materialist values and the need for theoretical and empirical advances to explore underlying processes, which likely will require more experimental, longitudinal, and developmental research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to understand a puzzling aspect of Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money, namely, the many religious analogies Simmel uses to characterize money. We argue that with these analogies Simmel indicates how what he would later term ‘the transcendent character of life’ permeates mundane monetary interactions. Specifically, we articulate how key religious forms of experience – faith, unity, and individuality – exist in monetary exchange and point toward a distinctively Simmelian way to understand the interplay between religion and economics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Money is increasingly being attributed more value in society, although a money-is-all attitude decreases social relationships and increases alienation in modern, industrialized societies. This research investigated the influence of this money-is-all attitude on alienation based on a cross-cultural comparison of Korea, the US and Sweden. The money-is-all attitude was defined as a perspective in which money is regarded as an indicator of achievement or success. Self-administered online surveys were conducted with consumers ranging between the ages of 20 to 49 in Korea, the US and Sweden. The money-is-all attitude and alienation seemed to be more pervasive in Korea than in the US or Sweden. The money-is-all attitude was the factor with the strongest influence on alienation when controlling for socio-demographic factors. Furthermore, participation in sports activities was an important factor in decreasing alienation levels. The findings of this research imply that materialistic ways of thinking increase alienation and that money cannot contribute to human happiness and well-being. In addition, active participation in social activities can decrease alienation. The research results suggest that a materialistic, money-is-all attitude negatively influences alienation across cultures; in addition, in the US, an affluent consumption-based country, the money-is-all attitude had more explanatory power for alienation than in Sweden and Korea. A change in values to overcome the money-is-all attitude is required and the concepts of sufficiency and mindfulness are suggested as alternative life perspectives for the pursuit of well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]