Study: Handling money minimizes pain
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
Tess Vigeland: If you’ve stocked up on aspirin in advance of April 15th, here’s another possible solution to your tax headaches: Go get a wad of dollar bills, or maybe a stack of quarters. A new study says handling greenbacks actually helps minimize both physical and mental pain.
Kathleen Vohs is a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota. Welcome to the program.
Kathleen Vohs: Hi, thanks for having me.
Vigeland: Can you take us through one of these experiences, and tell us what you found.
VOHS: In one of our experiments, our participants would come to the laboratory, and their first task would be either counting out slips of paper or counting out slips of money, hard currency. After that, we would have the participants then engage in a virtual ball tossing game. The participant does not pass the ball, and this elicits feelings of ostracism and social rejection. And we found that after our participants hand counted out money, as opposed to slips of paper, they felt less social pain, less rejection, less disrespect when it came to being rejected by those other participants.
Vigeland: So literally just touching money made them feel better about themselves.
VOHS: Yes, yes, it blunted the experience of what we know to otherwise be a painful event.
Vigeland: So what does that tell you?
VOHS: Well, it told us that money has pretty powerful psychological effects. And that when people are reminded of money, and they feel that they have some money, this means that they don’t need to be liked by others. They don’t need to be included by other people, because they have money to take care of their wants and needs.
Vigeland: But it’s not like you were giving them money, they were just touching it.
VOHS: Right, so the psychological symbolism of money is very deep, and even just mere reminders of money can elicit this construct and activate it in people’s minds and that seems to be enough to blunt the experience of pain.
Vigeland: Now the experiment that you talked about, blunting this notion of pain, this was just on a computer. But there was one even more dramatic example where you had people then put their fingers in hot, scalding water, and the people who had touched money didn’t feel as bad about that as the people who hadn’t.
VOHS: That’s right, so we saw the same pattern of results. Instead of the social pain domain, we moved it to the physical pain domain, and we see the same thing.
Vigeland: Well, so does that tell us that, you know, before surgery we should have people roll around in a bunch of $20 bills?
VOHS: I like the image. Yeah, that is one of the implications. I’ve given several talks at medical conferences now, because, sure, health care providers are very interested in the implications of this for how they can assuage pain in their patients.
Vigeland: What do you think would be other potential real life applications of these theories?
VOHS: As a person who went through a wonderful, but sometimes grueling, graduate school experience, I can imagine times before qualifying exams that I might have wanted to handle money or touch money.
Vigeland: But if you’re in grad school you don’t have any to touch, right?
VOHS: Yeah, right. It’s the irony. Right. We thought about bringing this into more of an interpersonal realm and having people touch money before they approach someone they would like to go on a date with.
Vigeland: Kathleen Vohs is a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. Thanks so much.
VOHS: Thank you, Tess.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
