How Money Messes With Your Mind [NY Times]

[parksobong]

Just stumbled across this interesting article in the NY Times (How Money Messes With Your Mind - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com) about a psychological study regarding the benefits of money.

They found that feeling rejected stirred a greater desire for money and that thoughts about losing money made social rejection sting more. They also found that thinking about having money made physical pain feel less acute, thoughts of losing money made physical pain worse, and being in physical pain made people want money more.

The authors conclude that “even the mere idea of money can have benefits.”
Money, they write, “operates as a social resource that confers a broad, strong feeling of being able to cope with problems and satisfy one’s needs. Resources are valued more in times of threat and adversity than at other times, presumably because resources improve one’s overall ability to cope. Getting or having resources reduces pain and suffering; conversely, losing resources makes one more vulnerable, which intensifies suffering.”

Those are “two good ways the manipulation could be used,” Professor Vohs said in an e-mail. “Other ideas are to have men count money before they go out hitting on women — because they are going to be rejected a lot. Or since money elicits feelings of strength, football players could count it before heading out onto the field (or maybe especially at halftime).”

 

[mgore714]

Subjects were Asian. Asian people are already socially awkward, thus making the whole study void.

 

[Deliguy]

makes sense but the report seems to overly analyze it. Money is nothing more then a great solver of problems. That said you could conclude everything they said in that entire study.

 

[Andrew Scherer]

Money is just energy

That's a whole lot of common sense done up in an overly-complex way