December 7, 2016
Interview with Claudia Hammond, author of the book Mind Over Money
Mike Carruthers: Money plays an important and sometimes confusing role in our lives. In a fascinating experimenet with wine…
Claudia Hammond: They put people in a brain scanner and they fed them some wine through a straw – probably not the best way of drinking wine. And then they told them sometimes they told them it was a 90 dollar bottle of wine and other times they told them it costs only 5 dollars.
Claudia Hammond, author of the book Mind Over Money…
People not only said they liked the wine that they thought was expensive better. But their brains actually liked it better as well. So there was more activity in the reward centers of the brain when they thought the wine was expensive. So they actually were, weirdly were enjoying it more if they thought it was expensive.
Here’s a helpful trick. If you want to save money and not touch it put it in a bank that sounds geographically far away.
Because even though you can just get that money online it feels as if it’s further away. So anything that makes the money feel less accessible and more of a bother to get means people are likely to leave it there for longer. So in a way you can trick yourself.
And here’s some great advice about friends and money…
Paying friends for favors is not a good idea. Because the moment you do that it reframes their nice piece of altruism as a financial transaction. Whereas if you just thank them for doing the lovely thing, and then maybe buy them a present later(you know not money but a present) then everything will work much better and it doesn’t bring money into the friendship.
