After the participants finished picturing a rich or poor lifetime, we exhibited her or him a photograph from a stylish people of opposite gender

We performed a pilot study to examine the effectiveness of the money prime before the experiment. The feeling of having relatively more or less money was triggered by asking participant to imagine being in a rich or poor situation and filling in some blanks to complete a story. Specifically, 56 participants (17 men, 37 women) were randomly assigned to two manipulations. In the relatively wealthy condition, participants were asked to imagine how they would live a luxurious life after winning the lottery; they completed sentences such as “I bought myself.” Participants in the relatively poor condition were asked to imagine how they would live a miserable life after losing a huge sum of money; they completed sentences such as “First, about food.” To determine the effectiveness of this money priming technique, participants were asked to rate how relatively wealthy they felt on a 9-point Likert scale. Result of a t-test showed that participants in the relatively wealthy condition (M = 4.83, SD = 1.56) did feel relatively wealthier than those in the relatively poor condition [M = 4.04, SD = 1.25; t₍₅₄₎ = 2.09, p = 0.042, Cohen’s d = 0.56]. This suggests that the money priming method is valid.

Abreast of arrival in the lab, they certainly were advised your experiment contains a creativeness try and an investigation associated with personal impression planning to build an excellent investigations ranging from a viewpoint formed by the looking at an image and you may a viewpoint molded because of the a facial-to-face communication. The fresh plan regarding a face-to-face interaction was applied and also make people believe that there was a chance to find a nice-looking member of the contrary gender, but so it did not in fact occurs.

Till the try, i requested ten guys and you will ten womens to rate four images off an attractive person of the opposite sex with the an effective nine-point Likert size (1 = entirely unattractive, 9 = most glamorous)

We then selected the two photos (one male, one female) that received the highest attractiveness ratings with the least variance (M_male = 6.92 SD = 0.90; M_female = 7.22, SD = 1.30). Participants were told to evaluate this opposite-sex individual by his/her photograph and that they would then have a 3-min face-to-face conversation with him/her. After the evaluation, participants were led to the next room, which had a long desk and six chairs. For half of the participants, a bag, a coat, and a book occupied the position closest to the door at one end of the group of chairs, while for the other half of the participants, these items were placed at the position furthest from the door at the other end of the group of chairs. Thus, we controlled for the influence of distance from this position to the door on the participants’ choices. Participants were told that the person they would be talking to had been sitting on the seat with the items and would come back soon. They were asked to take a seat and wait for a moment. They had five choices of chair (from 1 = “closest to” to 5 = “furthest from” this fictitious other’s seat). Their chair choice represented their chosen distance from the attractive alternative. When they sat down, the experimenter recorded their choice and gave them the PANAS Scale (Watson et al., 1988) to complete.

We up coming assessed whether the participants was indeed skeptical of your own defense facts. Three participants was taken from here analyses because of their suspicions. Eventually, we debriefed the participants.