Varieties of money - Experts' and non-experts' typicality judgments

The present research aims at testing Snelders et al.'s hypothesis that money category has the same characteristics as other fuzzy (or ill-defined) categories. An experiment was carried out by using a partially different set of exemplars. This decision has been suggested by two aspects: the first concerns the peculiarity of the Italian monetary system; the second aspect concerns the definition and the extension of the sample of the experimental items. Finally, it was investigated the role of expertise (e.g. being a bank clerk) to see whether it affected the representation of the money category. Such hypotheses have been verified by means of a classical task in which the subjects were asked to judge the typicality of a list of money exemplars. The results of the factor analysis showed that in both the students' (non expert) and bank clerks' (expert) samples the category structure is defined by three factors: ready money, bank money and money substitutes. No difference in the category structure was observed between experts and non-experts.