Rich people don't need friends

[jeffrey]

In 'The symbolic power of money: reminders of money alter social distress and physical pain' published in the journal Psychological Science, Xinyue Zhou, Kathleen Vohs and Roy Baumeister explored how money could reduce a person's feeling of pain and also negate their need for social popularity.

Harriet de Wit, Faculty Member for f1000 Medicine, said: "This research extends our understanding of relationships between social pain and physical pain, and remarkably, shows how acquired symbolic value of money, perhaps because of associations with power or control, can influence responses to both emotional and physical pain..."

Rich people don't need friends

[Radiance]

The first problem I see with this is seeing friendship as a meaning of getting "social acceptance".

I don't see my friends that way. I like to connect, I like to share and I like to help others. Those are needs my friends help fulfill.

God knows I am very unconventional and receive a lot of grief from my friends for not doing things as "expected".

I think, I can only especulate, that if I had lots of money I'd still want and need to connect, share ideas dreams and time with friends and have the opportunities to help and support others.

[Broken Arrow]

For convenience, Here's the full text of the study, and the following is the concluding remarks:

One of the remarkable advances of human over animal social life is the reliance on abstract, symbolic means of influence. Money is prominent among these: Money enables people to move the social system to confer benefits. As social animals, humans are deeply sensitive to social acceptance and rejection, but as cultural animals (see Baumeister, 2005), they are also sensitive to symbolic resources that might enable even rejected or unpopular persons to get what they need from the social system. The present findings indicate that the mere idea of money has considerable psychological power, enough to alter reactions to social exclusion and even to physical pain.

In each pair of studies in this investigation, social exclusion and physical pain yielded parallel effects. These findings add to the growing body of evidence that the human body's physiological systems for physical pain and trauma respond also to social, interpersonal events (MacDonald & Leary, 2005). The fact that the thought of an abstract social resource (money) produces reactions paralleling reactions to social acceptance and physical pain suggests how profoundly the human mind and body are attuned to, and perhaps designed for, functioning in complex social and cultural systems.

Sounds like a lot of chicken scratch in order to get your graduate thesis out of the way....