"Will Work For Food"

The words are often scrawled on a piece of cardboard and always painful to read, because they remind us of life’s fragility. They also pluck a deep chord in our psyche, because they reduce life to our most fundamental needs. After all, the sentiment behind those poignant words can be traced all the way back to the African
savannahs, to a time when our earliest ancestors did indeed do just that. In the eons before minimum wages and credit cards and 401-Ks, the closest thing to earnings and savings was bounty from the hunt. Food was more than nourishment; it was an asset.

Given this deep and ancient connection, it’s not implausible to think that food and money might still be tightly intertwined in our psychology, even deep-wired in our neurons. And in fact, behavioral scientists are very interested in the links between scarcity and hunger and gluttony on the one hand, and frugality and charity and stinginess on the other. Put simply: Could comfort food translate into feelings of financial security? Might there be a link between satiety and generosity? Can we literally be hungry for money?

Psychologists at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium decided to explore this dynamic in the laboratory. Barbara Briers and her colleagues did a series of three experiments designed to tease apart the connections between nourishment and personal finances. In the first, they deprived some people of food for four hours, long enough that they wouldn’t be starving but they would almost certainly have food on their mind. Others ate as usual. Then they put all of them in a real-life simulation where they were asked to donate to one of several causes. Those with the growling stomachs consistently gave less money to charity, suggesting that when people sense scarcity in one domain, they conserve resources in another. Put another way, people with physical cravings are in no mood to be magnanimous.

In the second study, Briers actually let the participants eat as usual, but with some she triggered their appetites by wafting the scent of baked brownies into the lab. Then they played a computer game that, like the earlier simulation, tested their generosity. Again, those with food on their minds were less willing to part with their cash. Interestingly, in this study none of the participants was actually hungry, meaning that the desire for brownies alone was powerful enough to make them into tightwads.

That’s pretty convincing evidence. But the psychologists decided to look at it the other way around. That is, they wanted to see if a heightened desire for money affected how much people ate. They had participants fantasize about winning the lottery, but some imagined winning big (25,000 euros) while the rest thought about a modest prize (25 euros). The researchers wanted the more outlandish fantasy to increase desire for money, so they had the winners further fantasize about what this imaginary windfall would buy them—sports cars, stereos, and so forth. They basically made some of the participants greedy and not others.

Then they had all the participants participate in a taste test of two kinds of M&Ms, although unbeknownst to them the scientists were actually measuring how much they ate. And yes, the greedy people scarfed down significantly more candy. It appears that the desire to accumulate money (and stuff) is a modern version of the ancient adaptation to accumulate calories. (For what it’s worth, people who were watching their weight did not break their diets, even if they were salivating for a large-screen TV. So perhaps we are not complete slaves to our evolutionary instincts. )

This final experiment is consistent with a classic study from the 1940s. In that study, poor kids consistently overestimated the size of coins, while rich kids did not. The new findings are also consistent with earlier research showing that poor men prefer heavier women. With both the poor kids and the poor men, financial insecurity was powerful enough to distort something as fundamental as perception.

The Belgian scientists (who report all three studies in the November issue of Psychological Science) speculate that all of this is wired into the brain. Both food and money are rewards, they give pleasure, and it’s possible that both (and perhaps other rewards as well) are processed in the same clusters of neurons devoted to savoring rewards.

Whatever the underlying neurology, the findings could help explain a phenomenon that has long perplexed public health officials: the high prevalence of life-threatening obesity among society’s most disadvantaged. It seems counterintuitive that those with the least money should be eating the most. But it may be, Briers suggests, that material success has become so important that when people fail in their quest for money, they get frustrated and their brains switch between two intertwined rewards. In effect, they're reverting back to a primitive state, when high-calorie food was the common currency. So those living hand to mouth do indeed work for food, but unhappily just not nutritious food.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

The Neurology of Contempt

A friend tells a story from years ago about driving her 7-year-old son to his elementary school, a trip that took them through a very seedy part of their Pennsylvania hometown. They were never threatened on these rides, probably because the drug addicts and homeless men on the streets were far too depleted to do any real harm. Yet the boy disliked these people, intensely. He told his mother he wasn’t afraid of them, and no, he didn’t feel sorry for them. He hated them.

Where did this young child’s disdain come from? Certainly all the formal messages he was receiving—from his parents, his religion, from society—were telling him to show compassion for such unfortunates. Why was he railing against life’s victims rather than weeping for them?

Scientists are interested in such extreme and perplexing forms of prejudice, and have tried to figure out the cognitive processes underlying emotions like pity and contempt. In two recent studies, both published in the October issue of the journal Psychological Science, they throw some light on both the neurology of repugnance and the early emergence of our attitudes about the privileged and the down-and-out.

Most people think of prejudice as simple animosity. But psychologists are coming to see this common human trait as far more complex than that. Indeed, it appears from a growing body of research that our emotional reactions to “others” are quite nuanced. We may pity people who are powerless but benign—the elderly, for example—yet we don’t despise them. And we may respect but dislike people who are powerful but not particularly warm--the very rich, for instance. It appears that we save our most extreme emotional assessment—pure contempt—for the doubly cursed: those who we perceive as not only cold but incompetent. At the extreme, we view these extreme rejects—addicts, bums, modern-day lepers—as barely human.

Two Princeton psychologists decided to explore what is going on in the brain when we experience these various mixes of emotions, including undiluted disgust toward life’s losers. Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske showed people photographs of middle-class people like themselves, photos of different kinds of “outsiders” like the elderly, the rich and the destitute, and finally photos of inanimate objects, and they simultaneously scanned their brains. They were particularly interested in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex, which is known to light up when we think about people and social interactions.

The results were fascinating and depressing. When participants looked at people much like themselves, they felt pride, a mix of admiration and warmth; the social brain predictably fired up. It also fired up when they viewed others with mixed emotions like envy and pity. But when they showed the subjects the most contemptible outsiders, the social brain went completely cold. They might as well have been looking at a photograph of a chair. In other words, they had in their minds completely dehumanized people who were marginalized by life’s lottery.

This sobering finding is consistent with the results of another study, this one with young children. Harvard University psychologist Kristina Olson and her colleagues told 5- to 7-year-old kids stories about fictional children and asked how much they liked them. Some of the fictional kids were lucky (they found $5) while others were unlucky (their soccer game was rained out); other kids were depicted as either good (they volunteered to help out) or bad (they lied to a parent). Not surprisingly, the participants liked the do-gooders more than the liars, but they also liked the lucky kids a lot more than the unlucky kids. What’s more, they didn’t favor the good kids all that much more than the fortunate kids. In other words, they were confusing misfortune with malevolence, and a lucky roll of the dice with actually being good.

The results of a second study were even more unwelcome. This time Olson had the kids view groups of kids on a computer screen; the two groups stood together and wore different color T-shirts, but were otherwise the same. The scientists again told stories, depicting one group as mostly lucky and the other as mostly unlucky. Then they introduced additional members to the two groups, and asked the kids in the study what they thought of the newcomers. Even though they knew nothing about the newcomers except the color of their T-shirts, they strongly preferred the ones who had “lucked into” the fortunate group. The life equivalent of this bias would be cozying up to those born into a privileged life--rather than, say, to those born into a life on the meaner streets of a Pennsylvania town. We can probably guess which group made the kids’ social neurons light up the brightest.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.