The best things in life are for free but it seems that money can buy you happiness. A new research shows that money dulls physical pain and eases the sting of social rejection. Through six experiments, psychologists and a marketing professor probed the power of money as a proxy for social acceptance. Among their results, they found that merely touching bills or thinking about expenses paid affected the participants both physically and emotionally. Because it affects pain, money can be a clue to how the brain evolved to process social interactions, Live Science quoted the researchers as saying. The study appears the journal Psychological Science.
In one experiment, 84 undergraduate student volunteers were divided into two groups and asked to take a “finger-dexterity test”. One group counted 80 $100 bills from a stack, the other group counted paper. Afterward, the volunteers played Cyberball, a computer game in which four players passed a ball to each other. They were told that they were playing with three real people, but in fact a computer simulated the other players. In half of the games, all the players received the ball an equal number of times, but the other half was rigged against the human players. And guess what? Those who played the rigged version of Cyberball reported that they felt snubbed. But, on average, those who had counted money before playing rated their level of social distress lower than those who had counted paper.