BBS Call for Commentators Instructions
 
 
Below the proposal instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and
a link to the full text of the forthcoming BBS target article:
 
  "Money as tool, money as drug: The biological 
 psychology of a strong incentive"
 
 Stephen E. G. Lea and Paul Webley
 
FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Lea/Referees/
 
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
 
To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, please email calls@bbsonline.org by July 19, 2005. 
 
The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation
(indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on
every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to
comment, or to suggest someone to comment.
 
Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. 
If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate
(there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your
work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators
are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current
BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name:
 
http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html
 
If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to
ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime,
your name, address and email address will be entered into our database
as an unaffiliated investigator.)
 
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 COMMENTARY PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS
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To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be
most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant
expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the
paper you would anticipate commenting upon.
 
Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal
invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the
final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise
and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS.
 
Please email calls@bbsonline.org by July 19, 2005

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 *** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION ***
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TARGET ARTICLE: Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology
of a strong incentive
 
AUTHORS: Stephen E. G. Lea and Paul Webley
 
ABSTRACT: Why are people interested in money? Specifically, what could
be the biological basis for the extraordinary incentive and reinforcing
power of money, which seems to be unique to the human species? We
identify two ways in which a commodity which is of no biological
significance in itself can become a strong motivator. The first is if
it is used as a tool, and by a metaphorical extension this is often
applied to money: it is used instrumentally, in order to obtain
biologically relevant incentives. However substances can be strong
motivators because they imitate the action of natural incentives but do
not produce the fitness gains for which those incentives are
instinctively sought. The classic examples of this process are
psychoactive drugs, but we argue that the drug concept can also be
extended metaphorically to provide an account of money motivation. From
a review of theoretical and empirical literature about money, we
conclude (i) that there are a number of phenomena that cannot be
accounted for by a pure Tool Theory of money motivation; (ii) that
supplementing it with a Drug Theory enables the anomalous phenomena to
be explained; and (iii) that the human instincts that, according to a
Drug Theory, money parasitizes include trading (derived from reciprocal
altruism) and object play.
 
KEYWORDS: Economic behaviour; evolutionary psychology; giving;
incentive; money; motivation; play; reciprocal altruism
 
FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Lea/Referees/
 
 
 
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 SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT
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(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
 
 In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
 to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
 limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
 it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
 year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
 biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
 would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
 
 (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
 basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
 indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
 nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
 potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
 impact!).
 
 
 
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