Powerful Buy Time: Why Social Power Leads to Prioritizing Time over Money

In this paper we examine how social power influences a consumer's willingness to buy time-saving options. Both money and time are valued resources but their relative value may vary amongst different individuals and different contexts. Money is a familiar, fungible, and unambiguous resource. In contrast time is difficult to account and more ambiguous (Soman 2001; Okada and Hoch 2004; Saini and Monga 2008). Given such difference between perceptions of temporal and monetary resources, we argue that spending time to save money can be viewed as a conservative investment where one is exchanging an ambiguous currency (time) for a relatively stable, fungible one (money). In contrast, spending money to buy additional time is a relatively audacious move because the returns on such an exchange are uncertain. Power is defined as asymmetric control over valued resources in social relations (Rucker, Galinsky and Dubois 2012). Power has been associated with risk taking capacity (Anderson and Galinsky 2006), increase approach- and action-tendencies (Smith and Bargh 2008) and invoke optimism and confidence (Fast, Gruenfeld, Sivanathan, and Galinsky 2009). Therefore, social power, by making a person more risk tolerant and action-oriented, leads people to save time by spending money. In a series of studies we examine how and why the state of felt social power influences people's decision to exchange money for time. In study 1a, participants (n = 150 undergraduates) made two hypothetical decisions involving trade-offs between time and money. Alongside, the Sense of Power scale (Anderson and Galinsky 2006) was administered. We averaged the responses to the time-saving option in the two scenarios. A linear regression with measured power as an independent variable revealed that greater willingness to spend money to save time was associated with a greater power of participants (b = 13.38, t = 3.15,p < .01). In study lb, participants (n= 155) read the scenario that involves time-money trade-offs, and answered if they would buy a time-saving option. Participant's chronic sense of power was measured using the same scale. Study lb included a gender, age, subjective economic status questions, and a "frugality" measure to control for possible confounds. As predicted, a logistic regression revealed that participants with higher power chose time-saving option more (β = .37, χ2 = 4.51, p < .05), and this relationship persisted even after controlling for all other measured variables (p = .