Poverty Hurts

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.