5.1. The perception of money. - Psychology of money

Money is the product and form of expression of commodity economy. This is a commodity whose special use value makes it, from the point of view of the economy, the universal equivalent of all commodities, turning it into capital. Money as an indispensable attribute of the economic life of people appeared in one form or another at the next stage of the development of society after a natural exchange. Attitudes toward them are determined both by the personality characteristics of individuals and the sociocultural characteristics of various communities.

Since psychological and social characteristics affect the attitude towards money, it is obvious that the reaction to them is not always and not all the same. Only where money can buy everything, they are the universal equivalent. But this concept is purely economic (fair for an economic person). However, in real life, the thesis about the universal equivalence of money is not so perfect. They are not in conditions of shortage, inflation, people with different values, different ages, different upbringing and psychological characteristics.

This chapter will discuss the general problems of the psychology of money, which can be interesting for both the economist and the psychologist. Psychologists are more interested in individual and group differences in the behavior of individuals, manifested mainly in changes in the monetary sphere, when people are confronted with money (in the form of wages, handling them, etc.). Money affects the little-studied general psychology of the emotional sphere. Consideration of individual plots of the impact of money will allow you to select several types of people, other than the typologies adopted in general psychology.

Human communities cannot exist for a long time on a parity basis due to the psychological differences of their members. Almost immediately, they form a hierarchy, subordination. A significant role in this process is played by things, and money in particular. In addition to purely economic functions (a measure of value, a medium of circulation, payment, accumulation), money is also involved in shaping the psyche of people, forming and satisfying the needs of survival, existence, self-satisfaction, occupation of a certain level in the community. Money is the most abstract, mysterious and not always predictable form of economic life.

The psychology of money is a section of economic psychology that studies the change in the psyche of people and, as a result, their behavior under the influence of money. Prerequisites for the development of the psychology of money can be found in the classical schools of psychology - psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognitive theories, etc.

The theme of the psychology of money is little developed even in the West, not to mention Russia. Here it was unreasonably long ideologically irrelevant. Some attention was paid to money in the sections of social, industrial psychology, management psychology, devoted to motives of labor activity and material incentives. True, even VM Bekhterev in his work “Collective Reflexology” asserted the significance of the attitude to money, the value of money in society and the relationship of this subjective value to the stability of the financial and economic market in the country.

There is no single theory or comprehensive work on the psychology of money. There are only scattered studies of the perception of coins and banknotes, people's attitudes to money, the effects of money on people's beliefs and behavior, the establishment of a correlation between the value attitude to money and per capita income, attitudes to money of men and women. There are works on the study of money as a factor of security, luck, love, freedom. There are separate and well-founded considerations that it is not so easy to relate the peculiarities of monetary behavior, attitudes to money with such personal, internal, psychophysiological qualities as, for example, temperament. It is more correct to relate them to the categories determined by external social mechanisms - values, attitudes, beliefs. By definition, a well-known Russian psychologist V. N. Myasishchev, an attitude is a component of a system of theoretical representations of a personality, reflecting its subjective-evaluative, consciously selective approach to reality and representing internalized experience of existence in a social environment. Attitude to money is a private attitude that outlines the economic and psychological sphere of this system.