A Dollar Is a Dollar Is a Dollar,or Is It? Insights From Children's Reasoning About “Dirty Money”

Money can take many forms—a coin or a bill, a payment for an automobile or a prize for an award, a piece from the 1989 series or the 2019 series, and so on—but despite this, money is designed to represent an amount and only that. Thus, a dollar is a dollar, in the sense that money is fungible. But when adults ordinarily think about money, they think about it in terms of its source, and in particular, its moral source (e.g., dirty money). Here we investigate the development of the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. We study children ages 5–6 and 8–9, who are sensitive to both object history and morality, and thus possess the component pieces needed to think that a dollar may not be like any other. Across three principal studies (and three additional studies in Appendix S1 ; N = 327; 219 five- and six-year-olds; 108 eight- and nine-year-olds), we find that children are less likely to want money with negative moral history, a pattern that was stronger and more consistent among 8- and 9-year-olds than 5- and 6-year-olds. These findings highlight pressing directions for future research that could help shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to the belief that money carries traces of its moral history.