Why Scrooge McDuck Is Never Sad-Money Reduces Pain

Why is Scrooge McDuck and Montgomery Burns never depressed? Because they are rich.

A study published in June 2009 Psychological Science tested the effects of money on physical and emotional pain from social rejection. Participants were unaware of the research's true focus.

Trial 1- Students count money then play a computer game in which they are intentionally snubbed but what they think are other human players. To test physical pain, students counted money then had their fingers dipped in 122F water. In both conditions, students with money had reported lower emotional and physical pain than the control group, who had counted blank paper.

How do you know the participants aren't just distracted by the sight of $800, the most money they will have in their hands during their entire college career??

Trial 2-Instead of counting money, students wrote down their expenses for last month (control group did weather). They then either were put down by the computer game or burned their fingers off. Results? Students who discussed their finances reported increased pain and social distress from the game.

The conclusion is money, either real or symbolic, is the key to our social interactions and therefore our emotional well-being (ie rich=popular). To explain the physical pain:

"The emerging hypothesis is that early in the evolution of social interactions, our brains took a shortcut to handle the new system: instead of laying down new biological hardware to process things like relationships and culture, human brains hacked their older hardware that deals with physical pain and gave it the double duty of handling social interactions."

This basically means our brains were lazy, didn't want to figure out social interactions, and was like f*ck it, we are going to make pain associated with other people.


...I don't know about you, but lack of money AND other people does cause me physical pain.