My friend Gwen McCauley sent me an interesting weblink that relates money with an individual’s tolerance of pain or affront.
I love coming across this stuff. Maybe it’s because (insert shameless plug here) my upcoming book suggests that money, as I mentioned in my very first post, is nothing more than an illusion.
Or maybe it’s because it serves as some sort of validation. After all, it’s one thing to make outrageous claims about money in a novel, but it’s something quite different when done in academia.
And yet this article written by Robert Goodier, and published in LiveScience.com, suggests, believe it or not, that money relieves pain.
And it doesn’t do so in ways you might think either. No, the article doesn’t say that having more money relieves pain, it says that pain is relieved by just touching money.
Now, how far-fetched is that?
And that’s not all money does either. As Goodier’s piece explains, experts conducted six separate experiments to show that, in addition to reducing physical pain, the mere handling of money served as “a proxy for social acceptance.”
If you haven’t hyper-linked to the article, let me summarize it for you.
Undergraduates were separated into two groups; one counted a stack of $100 bills, and the other counted plain paper. Then, members of each group had their fingers dipped in 122 F water.
Yes, you guessed it. On average, those that had counted money felt less pain than those who counted paper.
In another experiment, after counting either money or plain paper, each of the two groups played a game of Cyberball. Unbeknownst to half of each group, they were playing with a computer programmed to never pass them the ball.
While all undergrads playing the doctored version felt rebuffed, those that had counted money didn’t feel as offended as those who had counted plain paper.
Which makes me wonder…. what does it all mean?
Well, according to Kathleen Vos, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, it means, “These effects speak to the power of money, even as a symbol.”
Which is, no doubt, true.
What it also means, at least to me, is these experiments prove, once again, that it’s not the actual possession of money that people fixate on, but rather the concept of money.
And, could it also mean, as improbable as it may sound, that maybe money is an illusion after all?
