This appeared in the latest Free Inquiry magazine. I found it on the
website of Project Syndicate as well, and copied it from there.
I checked out the original article.* I think its conclusions hold up, and
that Singer represents them accurately here.
Ted
···
___________
* The psychological consequences of money. Science, vol. 314, 17 Nov 06, p.
1154.
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Project Syndicate
The Hidden Costs of Money
by Peter Singer
PRINCETON - When people say that "Money is the root of all evil," they
usually don't mean that money itself is the root of evil. Like Saint Paul,
from whom the quote comes, they have in mind the love of money. Could money
itself, whether we are greedy for it or not, be a problem?
Karl Marx thought so. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,
a youthful work that remained unpublished and largely unknown until the
mid-twentieth century, Marx describes money as "the universal agent of
separation," because it transforms human characteristics into something
else. A man may be ugly, Marx wrote, but if he has money, he can buy for
himself "the most beautiful of women." Without money, presumably, some more
positive human qualities would be needed. Money alienates us, Marx thought,
from our true human nature and from our fellow human beings.
Marx's reputation sank once it became evident that he was wrong to predict
that a workers' revolution would usher in a new era with a better life for
everyone. So if we had only his word for the alienating effects of money, we
might feel free to dismiss it as an element of a misguided ideology. But
research by Kathleen Vohs, Nicole Mead, and Miranda Goode, reported in
Science in 2006, suggests that on this point, at least, Marx was onto
something.
In a series of experiments, Vohs and her colleagues found ways to get people
to think about money without explicitly telling them to do so. They gave
some people tasks that involved unscrambling phrases about money. With
others, they left piles of Monopoly money nearby. Another group saw a
screensaver with various denominations of money. Other people, randomly
selected, unscrambled phrases that were not about money, did not see
Monopoly money, and saw different screensavers. In each case, those who had
been led to think about money - let's call them "the money group" - behaved
differently from those who had not.
* When given a difficult task and told that help was available, people
in the money group took longer to ask for help.
* When asked for help, people in the money group spent less time
helping.
* When told to move their chair so that they could talk with someone
else, people in the money group left a greater distance between chairs.
* When asked to choose a leisure activity, people in the money group
were more likely to choose an activity that could be enjoyed alone, rather
than one that involved others.
* Finally, when people in the money group were invited to donate some of
the money they had been paid for participation in the experiment, they gave
less than those who had not been induced to think about money.
Trivial reminders of money made a surprisingly large difference. For
example, where the control group would offer to spend an average of 42
minutes helping someone with a task, those primed to think about money
offered only 25 minutes. Similarly, when someone pretending to be another
participant in the experiment asked for help, the money group spent only
half as much time helping her. When asked to make a donation from their
earnings, the money group gave just a little over half as much as the
control group.
Why does money makes us less willing to seek or give help, or even to sit
close to others? Vohs and her colleagues suggest that as societies began to
use money, the necessity of relying on family and friends diminished, and
people were able to become more self-sufficient. "In this way," they
conclude, "money enhanced individualism but diminished communal motivations,
an effect that is still apparent in people's responses today."
That's not much of an explanation of why being reminded of money should make
so much difference to how we behave, given that we all use money everyday.
There seems to be something going on here that we still don't fully
understand.
I am not pleading for a return to the simpler days of barter or
self-sufficiency. Money enables us to trade - and thus to benefit from each
other's special skills and advantages. Without money, we would be
immeasurably poorer, and not only in a financial sense.
But now that we are aware of the isolating power that even the thought of
money can have, we can no longer think of money's role as being entirely
neutral. If, for example, a local parents' organization wants to build a
children's playground, should it ask its members to do the work on a
voluntary basis, or should it launch a fundraising campaign so that an
outside contractor can be employed?
Harvard economist Roland Fryer's proposal to pay poor students for doing
well at school is another area where using money is open to question. If
money were neutral, this would be just a question of whether the benefits of
using money outweigh the financial costs. Often, they will - for example, if
the parents lack the skills to build a good playground. But it would be a
mistake to assume that allowing money to dominate every sphere of life comes
without other costs that are difficult to express in financial terms.
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and the
author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and other books. He is
currently working on a book about philanthropy and world poverty.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.
www.project-syndicate.org