Hard cash is a pain killer.

Recently I was going through an article published on Harvard business school and came to know an interesting observation. Till date every one of us has been hearing that Money can buy bed but it can’t buy sleep, Money can buy food but can’t buy desire to eat and There are a lot of things that we can’t buy and Money is not every thing. I agree to all of the above statement with a precondition that “before making such statement one should have enough of it”. Money hai to honey hai.

Well coming back to the Observation

Kathleen Vohs create two team of subjects; to one team she gave a task of counting cash and to the other team she asked to count slips of paper. After that, she asked the subjects to dip their hands in extremely hot water or play a computer game which is not known to them and they’d be excluded by other players.

After this exercise The subjects who dipped there hand in hot water were asked to rate their pain and the game players were asked to rate their feeling of exclusion.

To a surprise subjects who had counted money felt less pain and less excluded as compared to the subjects who counted slips of paper. So the question being; “Does cold, hard cash really make us stronger and increase our physical and psychological resilience?”

According to Vohs the effect of handling money was quite pronounced in the four scenarios she tested. The people who handled money reported significantly less pain or social exclusion. The effect was so strong and to a surprise a reverse of that also worked.

In another experiment she asked some subjects to jot down their expenses from the past month and others to record the weather. And when the subjects were put in the same painful settings, those who’d itemized their bills felt more physical and emotional pain than those who’d described the weather.

So It’s a consistent effect. Having money makes us feel strong. Lacking it makes us feel weak.

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