Towards a more realistic psychology of economic socialization

doi:10.1016/0167-4870(93)90027-I

Journal of Economic Psychology

Volume 14, Issue 3, September 1993, Pages 461-472

https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-4870(93)90027-I Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper we argue that current research into economic socialisation is unsatisfactory for two main reasons. Most researchers have tended to regard the meaning of the term ‘economic’ as static and given and so have taken an adult-centred view of the child's world and investigated only those domains which are obviously economic (working, spending, borrowing, saving etc.). Secondly, researchers have concentrated almost exclusively on the question of cognitive development and so have asked ‘how do children come to understand the economic world of grown-ups’ and not ‘how do children solve the economic problems they are faced with’. We propose that researchers should be more concerned with the real economic world of childhood and we describe a few investigations that we have done in the style we favour. We conclude by discussing the implications of this approach for the future of economic psychology.

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As a matter of fact, monetary-unrelated bargaining in children can be considered economic because carried out with the intention to maximize a certain profit (Sonuga-Barke and Webley, 1993) and it is closer to the children’s world based on their social understanding of notions like reciprocity. Since the children could choose among different options, the items represented equally salient incentives according to personal preference and allowed us to join the children's social and economic world, in which monetary incentives − when bargaining − are not as significant as for adults (see also, Webley, 2005; Webley and Lea, 1993; Furnham, 2008; for review, see Marchetti and Castelli, 2012). Delay of gratification was assessed through an intertemporal choice task, and namely the Marshmallow Task (MT).
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^☆: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the First European Colloquium on ‘Towards an understanding of youth life-styles and consumption patterns’, Paris 26–27 September 1991.

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Towards a more realistic psychology of economic socialization☆

Abstract

Journal of Economic Psychology

Journal of Economic Psychology

Journal of Economic Psychology

Journal of Economic Psychology

Swopping

The Child's Construction of Economics

Fighting with Property: A Study of Kwakiutl Potlatch and Warfare 1792–1930

The Social Psychology of Material Possessions

Consumer Psychology in Behavioural Perspective

The Hidden Economy

An examination of the psychological aspects of money

Assessing the psychology of economic behaviour and cognition

The Individual in the Economy