Skip to main content

Home/ (*net) Money/ Group items tagged autonomy

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Wildcat2030 wildcat

It's all about autonomy: Consumers react negatively when prompted to think about money ... - 1 views

  •  
    "Whether they are aware of it or not, consumers dislike being reminded of money-so much that they will rebel against authority figures, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "When consumers are reminded of money, do they conform, shrug it off, or react against others' attempts to influence them?" ask authors Jia (Elke) Liu (University of Groningen), Dirk Smeesters (Erasmus University), and Kathleen D. Vohs (University of Minnesota). The researchers found that money reminders lead consumers to react against people who would normally influence their decisions. In three studies, participants were subtly reminded of money by either working on a computer with a hard currency screensaver or by formulating sentences using money-related words. "Because money reminders boost the importance of consumers' autonomy, those subtly reminded of money perceived the authority commands and off-handed peer opinions as threats to their autonomy, which did not occur among those not reminded of money," the authors write. Specifically, the participants who were reminded of money reacted in opposite ways from authority figures or peers when it came to evaluating products. Conversely, participants who were not reminded of money followed commands or suggestions of authorities and peers. "This reactance to social influences only occurs when money-reminded consumers made decisions for themselves," the authors write. "When these consumers were asked to make decisions for a relatively intimate other, they were indifferent to social influences (i.e., the unsolicited opinion of another consumer)." "This research highlights money's ability to stimulate a longing for freedom, and has potential implications for interpersonal communication, advertisers, and markets," the authors write. "Money cues are frequently present in the social environment (e.g., televisions spots mentioning savings or discounts, in-store signage with dollar signs, billboards advertising the state l
Kurt Laitner

New Currency Frontiers: Membrane Currencies - 1 views

  • This fact, that the boundaries of a membrane are somewhat fuzzy, is particularly interesting because that's exactly what membranes themselves are: boundaries. They are the component of a system that makes it appear to be a separate, complete, and integral system in the context of some environment.
  • Membranes can be seen as that which creates a context, or environment, in which subsystems can be coordinated to into being an integral whole.
  • Membranes are permeable. One of the most important features of any membrane, is exactly the form and shape that it gives to permeability. This permeability, is clearly a mechanism for regulating flows in and out of a system, of coordinating how the inside of the system will see the outside, of limiting/enhancing/controlling/shaping/transforming what gets in and out.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • In some living systems it's very easy to see the membranes as they map one-for-one with the very things we see.
  • Michael realized that for a self-organizing resilient currency network to form, there had to be a self-declared boundary system by which currencies and accounts in those systems could be declared and named, such that they would be visible and known to the entire network, but also such that any such group had it's own autonomy and control within that domain. This is a profound insight: naming is one of the key elements that creates the membrane of the social organism. Names are part of what creates the boundary that make a social organism distinguishable as an independent whole.
  • The flowplace design included the notion of a "circle," which was a way to group users and currencies. The circles were completely separate from the currency network addresses (which we were now calling wallets). We conceived of circles as providing a context for action. So any group that wanted to use free currencies to build wealth together, could come to the flowplace, and start by creating a circle, and a bunch of currencies that it would use to measure it's wealth.
  • When you have such circles, immediately you need to address the "security" questions of who gets to add new members into the circle. And then also the question of who gets to create currencies in a given circle, and so on. So I sat down to code these "administration" features into the flowplace, when it hit me that the meta-currency infrastructure we were using to create the currencies in the flowplace, was exactly what I needed to implement these permissions structures for the circles
  • Well, the meta-currency infrastructure provides a language (XGFL) for creating those formal systems, and in the flowplace I'd already used it to create some trade, performance metric, and reputation currencies.
  • I saw that I could use this same language to specify the permissions that participants of the circle have in regards to the currencies that the circle uses, and that that very specification could simultaneously serve as a naming, i.e. a mapping, between people, currencies and roles in the context of the given circle.
  • we realized that the membrane currency also has a broader naming function in that it is also responsible for creating names for all the currencies in use by the circle, be they currencies that are created by circle for internal use only, or be they currencies created externally. The membrane currency brings such currencies "inside" the circle, by virtue of giving them a local name.
  • It is a membrane, which is the systemic component that both separates and connects the organism from its environment
  • The membrane is not so much a static physical barrier, as it is an active process that mediates between "inside" and "outside."
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20 items per page