Washington ? “Show me the money,” demanded Cuba Gooding Jr., in the movie “Jerry McGuire.”

He meant pay me the money, of course, but it turns out that merely showing it to people can change their behavior.

Kathleen Vohs, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues conducted a series of nine experiments in which people were asked to do puzzles or other tasks. The behavior of people exposed to money was compared with others who were not prompted to think about it.

The two groups acted differently, the researchers report in today’s issue of the journal Science.

“The mere presence of money changes people,” Vohs said. “The effect can be negative, it can be positive. Exposure to money, or the concept of money, elevates a sense of self-sufficiency,” and can make people less social.

For example, she said, a student with little money who wants to move to a new apartment gets a bunch of friends together and they share a few laughs during the move.

But once people get a good job, they hire a mover. That may be more efficient, but they lose out on some personal moments, she explained in a telephone interview.

“The underlying idea is that at some point early on in human evolution, everyone probably needed someone else to help them achieve their goals,” whether building a home or catching food.

Eventually systems of exchange came along, and then money, which could be exchanged for things, allowing people to pursue their own aims without the aid of others. So, over time, people with money didn’t need other people so much.

In one of the experiments, 52 University of Minnesota students were divided into groups and asked to make sentences out of a scrambled group of words. For one group the sentence turned out to be “a high-paying salary” while others got “it is cold outside.”

Then they were asked to arrange a set of discs into a square and told they could ask for help if they needed it. Some of those who had made sentences not mentioning money were placed so they could see a stack of Monopoly money.

The students who had unscrambled the sentence about money worked on the puzzle an average of 5.2 minutes before asking for help. Those who had made the neutral sentence but could see the play money worked on it an average of 5.1 minutes.

But students who had no money-related prompt turned to others for help sooner: They worked just more than 3 minutes before asking for help.