Money. It's on everyone's mind more than ever this year. There's no escape from it. Outrage at executive's getting big bonuses, worries about losing your job and not having any coming in, being preoccupied with how to get more. We think about it more than we'd like. It's the root of all evil, we're told. Or at least the love of it.
New research suggests that the human mind has an association with money at the deepest and most primal levels. Indeed, we're incapable of thinking rationally about it for this very reason. Research done along side psychologists from China and Florida by Kathleen Vohs, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota has found some interesting links between money and pain. No, not the obvious ones, this is new.
Essentially what they did was conduct experiments wherein one group of people were "primed" by being given paper money to handle and another group weren't. The two groups then had their tolerance to pain measured in relation to hot water. Those who handled the paper money had a higher pain tolerance than those didn't. While they didn't report on the idea that paper money might have some magical properties we were previously unaware of, i'm pretty sure they believe it was the psychological aspect of handling the money they believe caused the difference in pain tolerance.
These tests were a follow up to research Voha published in 2006 in which a series of experiments used psychological priming to test the effects of money on human behaviour. In those experiments the subjects weren't given money to handle, rather they were exposed to the idea of money through word games, stories about and photos of money. They were then given tasks to perform.
What she found was that primed subjects worked on the tasks longer, were less helpful, less generous, more socially remote, even more malicious and less likely to ask for help than those who hadn't been primed. Perhaps the whole money being the root of all evil is more accurate than we knew!
So money is more than a medium of exchange that we use to secure our material place in the world, it's far more significant than that, and if this research is correct, it's something that tends to, or at least has the propensity to alienate us from others. So with these recessionary times being what they are, does this mean we'll all get along better with each other?
Apparently not. Another finding of the research was that while handling money reduced the pain of social rejection, the tolerance for physical pain was reduced for those who had handled the paper money after they were reminded of their recent spending activities. This would suggest that the economic meltdown would have people feeling more pain overall.
In a 2008 article published by the Association for Psychological Science, Vohs says the results of her priming tests had led some to conclude that the tests demonstrate that money makes people selfish and greedy. That's certainly a part of the zeitgeist, but she says that conclusion does not necessarily fit her data.
A selfish person would have immediately asked for help when given a tough assignment; they would reject the notion of accepting more work than was necessary. Exactly the opposite occurred in the testing. What this means is that there is more to the picture than is yet fully understood.
Our relationship with money is certainly complex, and perhaps it's something we all need to pay a bit more attention to if we want to lead better lives.
