Study: Your Brain Thinks Money Is A Drug

Study: Your Brain Thinks Money Is A Drug
David Kestenbaum
NPR
8.7.09


If you've ever thought of money as a drug, you may be more right than you know. New research shows that counting money — just handling the bills — can make things less painful.

"It is surprising," says Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management who participated in the research. "It still surprises me."

The experiments were conducted by a colleague of Vohs' in China. Students came into the lab and were told they would be participating in a test of finger dexterity. One group was given a pile of Chinese currency to count. Another group was given blank pieces of paper to count.

Then, some of the students were asked to put their fingers in bowls of water heated to 122 degrees Fahrenheit and rate how uncomfortable it felt.

"The subjects who had earlier been counting money and had their hands in the painfully hot water reported that the water didn't feel so hot to them, compared to people who had counted slips of paper," Vohs says.

How hot is 122 degrees Fahrenheit? Not hot enough to do lasting damage, but hotter than the Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends setting your home water heater. I heated some water in the microwave and used a thermometer to make sure I'd hit the mark — I can testify that 122 degrees is uncomfortable. "Like a hot hot tub?" Vohs asked during our interview. Yes. "Good, OK," she said, then confessed, "Boy, you know I never did that."

Money As A Substitute For Love

The experiment and related ones are described in a research paper titled The Symbolic Power of Money, published in the journal Psychological Science. Combined with earlier work, it maps out a curious connection. As far as your brain's concerned, money can act as a substitute for social acceptance, reducing social discomfort and, by extension, physical discomfort and even pain.

Researcher Xinyue Zhou, of the department of psychology at Sun Yat-Sen University in China, puts it in very human terms. "We think money works as a substitute for another pain buffer — love."

Past research has shown that a social relationship can make things hurt less. "If you dip your hand in hot water, if someone is standing there beside you, then you feel less pain," Zhou says. "That was a classic experiment."

Money as a substitute for social acceptance and love? Zhou laughs and admits that it's kind of sad. "All substitutes are sad."

Vohs found the results of the money-handling experiment especially surprising because the effects last so long. Sometimes a full 10 minutes had elapsed between the time students handled the money and the instant they put their fingers in the water.

The researchers had them fill out surveys as they waited. The responses offered some clues as to what was going on in the brain. The students were asked a litany of questions: Did they feel happier after counting the money, or sadder? What stood out, Vohs says, was a feeling of strength. "When subjects had been reminded of money, 10 minutes later they said inexplicably they just felt stronger," Vohs says.

The Power Of 'Priming'

The experiment could prove groundbreaking. "It's a substantial finding," says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. The research "has the potential to be something of a discovery, which we don't always have all that often in psychology."

Epley says the long-lasting connection between being reminded of money and feeling less pain appears to be an elaborate example of something psychologists call priming, in which thinking about one thing can subconsciously trigger a related response.

Epley cites another experiment where subjects were primed to think about old people. "It turns out that if you make people think about old people, lo and behold, they walk more slowly!"

Economists have studied money for ages — how prices, for instance, can efficiently direct the flow of resources. But meanwhile, in our brains, money has become a curious force, in this case behaving a bit like aspirin.

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Perhaps a bit of a stretch for DiTM, but interesting.

Goes a long way to explaining why multi billionaires never seem to be able to have enough.

Pretty damn interesting. I might start counting my money every morning and see if I am in higher spirits. Considering how poor I am though it would probably have the opposite effect. lmao

goes a long way to explaining why most people with billions have something really off about them, like when you look at their eyes, there's something really creepy happeneing

cussing also serves to reduce pain and discomfort. it might not be that money acts as a drug, but perhaps it stimulates endorphin release, and _that_ is creates the reduction in pain/discomfort.

spicy foods stimulate endorphin release too (which makes them 'addictive'), but thats because they actually cause pain. maybe the whole 'addiction to money' thing is related to that as well?

tathra said:

cussing also serves to reduce pain and discomfort. it might not be that money acts as a drug, but perhaps it stimulates endorphin release, and _that_ is creates the reduction in pain/discomfort.

spicy foods stimulate endorphin release too (which makes them 'addictive'), but thats because they actually cause pain. maybe the whole 'addiction to money' thing is related to that as well?

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thats a good idea. it has to do with pain and with social relief of pain (which i believe is also related to opiates)

well you can certainly turn money into drugs quite easily so I can see that

Maybe its because 80% of money has drug residue on it. LOL

Money is just frozen energy.
Drugs are the same thing.

Money lets you create something (e.g. a new business), or change the nature of "reality" (this car is now mine).
Drugs create something - a new physical/psychological state, a new way of experiencing life, new thought patterns and connections, and they also change the way we understand the nature of (and the way we experience) "reality".

Money gives us power over our environment.
Drugs give us power over our internal environment. (Make sadness or pain disappear with heroin, or open up your subconscious with LSD).
(I am not saying that we can always control all of the effects after taking LSD, for example, but we also can't control what happens if we buy a baseball team. Players might quit, or get injured, etc. The power I am talking about is the power to begin something new - a psycho-emotional experience, a reordering of the physical world through some purchase, or of the psychological world through some drug intake - and then we can only watch to see what life does.)

Money and drugs give us control. Money allows us to control the physical world, to some extent, by purchasing plants, or art, or a new house, or a plane ticket, or staying in a 4-star hotel. There is still a chance that we will see trash strewn on the ground in the 4-star hotel, or that our first-class plane ticket will not save us from disaster, or that our new house in a safer area will be robbed.
Drugs allow us to control the emotional/psychological world, to some extent, by setting up a neurophysical reaction though which we will experience our lives differently. There is still a chance that we will have a bad trip, or overdose, etc.

We can use money in any way we choose. Some people use it in healthy ways, other's don't.
Same for drugs.
Some people use money/drugs for self-exploration, others to feel more comfortable, and others use them to hide.

Money and drugs have the potential to cause change in the world, but only if we decide to put them into action. An unused stash of drugs, or money, has not allowed the owner to realize the power of that money/ those drugs.

Drugs and money can often go together, like bread and butter, but I am thinking instead of how they are similar.

Having lots of either one will "earn" you "friends" who are really interested in sharing your stash with you.

You have to hide your money and your drugs, or other people will take them away from you.

You go through money, and drugs, and each portion can only be used once. They are both resources that are limited.

Etc. Etc.

It's funny, this same thing struck me when I was living in China. The Chinese by and large don't enjoy alcohol the way Westerners do, and our penchant for abusing it seems to really baffle a lot of them. This owes both to biology (the "Asian flush") and culture.

Instead, I noticed, about the same percentage of the population who in the West would be driven to abuse alcohol, were instead driven to money-related vices in China: gambling, risky stockmarket playing, engaging in shady business, and falling for flashy 'get rich quick' scams.