It’s Official: Money Can Buy Happiness

Ear to ear, baby!
In a recent research paper titled The Symbolic Power of Money (published in Psychological Science) Zhou, Vohs, and Baumeister performed six experiments, with results that suggest that even the idea of money can have beneficial effects on us. Even counting money can apparently reduce the pain of being socially ostracized, and even real physical pain.
How powerful is that? The idea is that money is a social resource that gives the owner a “strong feeling of being able to cope with problems and satisfy one’s needs”. In other words, money makes you confident and gives you a feeling of being in charge. (And now you wonder why we need scientists doing all these experiments to tell us something we already know, right?)
Still, it is really good to get these confirmed through controlled scientific experiments. Also, I think they really underlined something important here:
- Even the idea of having money can give you all these benefits. You don’t even have to have the money! (The subjects in the experiments were merely asked to count money.)
- The social and psychological benefits of money apply even to things that can’t really be solved using money. Just by having money, you become able to evaluate your (painful) experience in a more positive manner, regardless of whether money will actually solve the problem.
- The “feeling of strength” that money confers is likely to be something exclusive to money, and not the other pleasant stimulus (e.g.: chocolate).
So in conclusion, money makes you feel powerful, and in the long run you probably end up happier because having money lessens the pain you experience in this world. You can afford not to give a damn!
Isn’t money awesome?









