A new wave of newly minted college grads are hoping to enter the workforce this summer, and their prospects aren't looking good. The recession is taking a toll, and many of these young people may be leaving the comfortable cocoon of campus life to face a doubly painful reality of job rejection and financial hardship.
Their pain is not just metaphorical. Psychologists have been studying the connections between social and economic suffering, and an emerging theory suggests that these experiences are intertwined. What's more, the sting of rejection and the pain of poverty may be further linked to the body's physical pain perceptions. Which means we may literally ache for money and just as literally feel the sting of poverty.
Three psychologists recently explored the psychological meaning of money in the laboratory. Xinyue Zhou, Kathleen Vohs and Roy Baumeister ran a series of experiments to examine the complex interplay of earning or losing money, social acceptance or rejection and very real pain. Here's an example of their work:
The psychologists used a ruse to prime volunteers' thoughts about money. The testgivers told subjects that they were taking part in a dexterity test, in which half of them counted pieces of paper and the other half counted a stack of $100 bills, a lab task well known to activate the idea of earning and having money. Then they ran two experiments. In one, the volunteers all took part in a pain-tolerance test, which involved dipping the volunteers' fingers in very hot water. In another, they participated in a computerized ball-tossing game, which had been set up to shun certain players—much like kids are ostracized on the playground.
The idea was to see if being flush with cash would lead to less painful feelings of rejection—and if it would salve actual physical suffering as well. It did both, unmistakably. Those who had counted real C-notes reported less pain—both social and physical—than did those who had just counted paper.
What's going on here? Well, the psychologists' theory is that social pain is merely a modern version of more basic physical pain. Our ancient brain evolved a pain detector to warn us away from peril, and as we became social animals, the emotional pain detector was piggy-backed on top. The modern brain mixes them up. They further speculate that money is a social resource, interchangeable with popularity. Having money increases people's confidence in their ability to negotiate their social world. So having money bolsters self-esteem and defuses the pain of ostracism—and in the process diminishes actual pain.
If earning money eases pain, losing money—or earning power—should similarly increase pain. The psychologists ran another experiment to test this. This time, they primed thoughts of losing or not having money. They did this by having half the volunteers compile a detailed list of everything they had spent money on in the previous month; others merely wrote about the weather, to serve as controls. Then they all participated in the same computerized ball game, and as before, some were ostracized and others not.
The findings were unambiguous. As reported in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, thinking about expenses and spending—lack of money in general—increased feelings of distress, especially for those who were excluded by their social group. It also led to diminished pain tolerance in the hot-water test. Put another way, people who were focused on financial need suffered more pain of every kind than people who felt financially empowered.
When the researchers looked at this the other way around, they found that inflicting pain or social rejection also increased volunteers' desire for money. There's the risk of a vicious spiral here: the very real pain of being poor and marginalized could actually exaggerate and distort the desire the desire for money, so that further rejection and hardship is even more painful, and so on. The result could be a kind of psychological inflation.
Back to those recent college grads. A recession is a time of adversity, and it's very threatening on many levels. Money becomes much more highly valued during hard times because it makes people feel stronger and more able to cope. But it's also scarcer, so people actually experience more pain. A further risk is that those who feel powerless because of economic circumstances will look for a different pleasure, other than a paycheck, to boost their confidence: food, alcohol, drugs. It won't work, but it would be understandable.
Wray Herbert writes the We're Only Human blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.