Italians See Money as Work and Well-Being, Americans See It as Cash and Happiness

Ask an Italian what comes to mind when they hear the word money, and the answer is likely to be work, peacefulness, and well-being. Ask the same question of an American, and the response tilts toward cash, bills, necessity, and happiness. That, at least, is the striking conclusion of a new cross-national study published in Trends in Psychology, which set out to map how ordinary people in Italy and the United States collectively represent one of the most charged objects in modern life. The research, led by Giulia Sesini of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan together with colleagues at Kansas State University, is among the first to apply the theory of social representations to money across two national contexts, and its findings suggest that the meaning of money is anything but universal.

The theoretical foundation of the study comes from the social psychologist Serge Moscovici, who developed the Theory of Social Representations by building on Émile Durkheim’s earlier notion of collective representations. A social representation is a shared reconstruction of reality, shaped by the dominant norms, values, and ideologies of a society, and it arises through interpersonal interaction and communication. Where money attitudes describe an individual’s personal beliefs, emotions, and behavioral inclinations, social representations frame money as a social object, embedded in a constellation of relationships with saving, debt, investment, trust, and politics, and evolving over time as new events are assimilated. This distinction matters because attitudes do not form in a vacuum: they grow out of a cultural, historical, and economic framework that the collective supplies in advance.

The authors identified three gaps in the existing literature that their study was designed to fill. First, most psychological research on money has focused on attitudes rather than on the social representations that underpin them. Second, the field has relied overwhelmingly on quantitative methods with closed-ended questions, which reveal little about how specific money attitudes form in context. Third, genuinely cross-cultural and cross-national comparisons remain scarce, even though evidence shows that culture shapes how people perceive and categorize monetary resources. In many Western societies money is closely associated with autonomy and personal achievement, whereas in several Asian countries it is more often linked to relational and familial obligations, respect, and ethics. Earlier work in France by Vergès found that work and well-being anchored the representation of money, while a study in Turkey placed work in a more peripheral position, hinting at meaningful cultural variation.

Italy and the United States made an intriguing comparison because they share some cultural traits while diverging sharply on others. Both score similarly on individualism and on perceptions of power equality, yet they differ in willingness to accept uncertainty, time orientation, and indulgence. Italians tend to experience more stress and anxiety when facing unpredicted events, adapt traditions to circumstances, and encourage thrift, while Americans are more flexible in the face of challenges, focus on the present, and report higher happiness and life satisfaction. The economic backdrop also diverges: the United States has outperformed Italy in GDP growth in recent decades and recovered more strongly from the pandemic, while Italy continues to struggle with unemployment rates among the highest in Europe, trailing only Greece and Spain. The two welfare systems differ too, with Italy’s conservative-corporatist model tying benefits to employment and family support, and the American liberal model emphasizing individual responsibility and means-testing.

Methodologically, the researchers used the free association technique, the classic instrument of social representation research. Between March and May 2022 they collected data from 305 Italian participants, and by December 2022 they had gathered 515 participants in the United States, all recruited through an online panel and surveyed via Qualtrics. Each participant was asked to write up to ten words or expressions that came to mind when thinking about money, then to assign a positive, neutral, or negative valence to each one. They also completed three validated scales: the Financial Threat Scale, measuring fear and uncertainty about financial security; a Financial and General Vulnerability scale, assessing the likelihood of future hardship; and the Multidimensional Subjective Financial Well-being Scale, capturing satisfaction with one’s current financial situation. The Italian protocol was approved by an ethics committee at Università Cattolica, and the American protocol by Kansas State University’s research compliance office.

The analysis proceeded in three steps. A prototypical analysis, run with the IRAMuTeQ software, applied Abric’s Central Core theory, which holds that a social representation has a dual structure: a central core embodying its essence, and a peripheral zone reflecting individual differences and more adaptable meanings. Words were grouped semantically and plotted by frequency and mean rank of evocation, with lower ranks indicating greater salience. A correspondence analysis using the HOMALS procedure then mapped the associations in a two-dimensional space, and finally correlational analyses linked the resulting dimensions and emotional valence to the financial scales. A diversity index, computed by dividing the number of distinct terms by total occurrences, gauged the level of consensus in each sample.

The Italian results revealed a representation organized around abstract, symbolic values. The word money elicited 302 different associations with a mean valence of 0.31, and the most frequent responses were Work, cited by 21 percent of respondents, followed by Peacefulness at 16 percent, Well-being at 15 percent, Expenses at 15 percent, and Necessity at 13 percent. The prototypical structure placed Work and Well-being in the central core, with negative concepts entirely absent and only neutral terms such as Expenses, Necessity, and Cash in the periphery. The correspondence analysis produced two axes: a horizontal one contrasting an instrumental perspective, anchored by words like coins, paper money, cash, and wage, with a symbolic perspective marked by peacefulness, autonomy, freedom, and power; and a vertical one contrasting an individual dimension of daily practices such as effort, free time, saving, and investment with a universal dimension evoked by richness and poverty. Correlations showed that Italians who attributed a more positive valence to money reported less financial threat, less vulnerability, and higher subjective financial well-being.

The American picture was strikingly different in content, though structurally parallel. Money evoked 462 different associations with a higher mean valence of 0.42 and a diversity index of just 0.13, indicating strong consensus. The most frequent associations were Cash, cited by 25 percent of respondents, Necessity at 21 percent, Bills at 20 percent, Happiness at 19 percent, and Saving at 19 percent. The central core contained four elements, two tangible, Cash and Bills, and two psychological, Necessity and Happiness, while the periphery was dominated by pragmatic terms such as Saving, Paying, Salary, Funds, and Investing, with abstract words like Life, Power, and Importance relegated to the distant periphery. The correspondence analysis again yielded instrumental and symbolic poles, and individual and universal dimensions, but the overall image was of money as a practical, functional tool whose centrality to happiness is taken for granted. In the American sample, a more positive valence correlated strongly with higher subjective financial well-being and with lower perceived financial threat.

The convergence in structure alongside divergence in content is the study’s most theoretically interesting result. In both countries, money proved to be a polymorphous object, simultaneously symbolic and utilitarian, individual and universal. But the emotional center of gravity differs: Italians defend an abstract, strongly symbolic vision in which money connects to work, security, freedom, and long-term well-being, and their outlook is more ambivalent and cautious, consistent with earlier Italian studies that found negative visions of money centered on job loss, uncertainty, and fear of the future. Americans, by contrast, hold a pragmatic, positive representation in which money determines happiness, echoing prior cross-national research showing that Americans attribute more importance to money than Europeans do, and even Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in 1835 that love of wealth lies at the bottom of the actions of Americans. The authors interpret the difference as a reflection of both economic conditions, with Italian unemployment making work central to the meaning of money, and cultural values, with American individual responsibility fostering a transactional view of money as the key to immediate satisfaction.

The practical implications reach into financial education and professional practice. In Italy, the authors suggest, financial education should foster a more constructive vision of money as a tool for achieving meaningful goals, emphasizing long-term security and the link between financial habits and quality of life. In the United States, programs should encourage a shift from a transactional state of happiness toward more stable well-being, helping people recognize the risks of equating money with happiness. Across both countries, the findings argue for moving beyond basic financial literacy to address the psychological dimensions of money, using strategies such as journaling, group discussion, and values-clarification exercises, since objective knowledge alone seldom changes behavior. Financial planners and mental health practitioners alike can use these insights to surface clients’ underlying beliefs about money. The authors caution that their samples were not nationally representative and that social representations are snapshots of a precise historical moment, calling for longitudinal replications in more diverse cultural settings. Even so, the message is clear: money means different things in different places, and any policy or education that ignores those shared meanings risks missing the point entirely.

Subject of Research: Cross-national comparison of social representations of money in Italy and the United States

Article Title: Thinking About Money: Cross-national Comparison of Social Representations of “Money” in Italy and the United States

Article References: Sesini, G., Gray, B., McCoy, M., Seay, M., & Lozza, E. (2026). Thinking About Money: Cross-national Comparison of Social Representations of “Money” in Italy and the United States. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00518-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00518-7

Keywords: social representations, money psychology, economic psychology, cross-cultural comparison, Italy, United States, free association, financial well-being, money attitudes, financial education, Serge Moscovici, happiness