In business, marketing and social work, financial incentives are often used to increase people's motivation, guide their behavior and achieve lasting success. However, the latter is not always the case, as a recent study in Royal Society Open Science by the University Hospital of Würzburg (UKW) shows. Prof. Dr. Grit Hein and her team at the Center for Translational Social Neuroscience at the Center for Mental Health (ZEP) investigated whether people from a particular group would approach a foreign group if they received money for doing so.