The passage from the Bible is often misquoted; it's actually: "The love of money is the root of all evil." According to an op-ed in the Guardian UK, money itself may be responsible for a long list of social evils:
Peter Singer: Money may be widening the social and emotional gap between us Karl Marx thought so. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, a youthful work that remained unpublished and largely unknown until the mid-20th century, Marx describes money as "the universal agent of separation" because it transforms human characteristics into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.
The results of the experiment seem to indicate that participants who had 'money' - even 'play' money - to work with were less likely to either ask for help or give it. They also seemed to distance themselves from other participants in ways like the distance between chairs.
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.
It's hard to imagine a society without money; but, we need to be reminded, from time to time, of the ways that money, and the love of money, can damage the social fabric.
Read more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/17/psychology
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