(no subject)
Закончилось, когда кто-то из нас стал зарабатывать деньги, и мы поняли, что именно они делают нас разными. Они нас разделили.
Another example of how people tend to see money as a conscious actor that has the ability to directly influence their lives. As if money, not they themselves, made the decision to part with old friends and seek some new more promising connections. Why is that so? What is this unique property of a rather simple exchange medium that makes us perceive it as an external force instead of what it really is: a simple piece of colored paper or a number on a bank statement?
In this particular case money plays the role of an easily accessible success quantifier. A person, having solved, either consciously or subconsciously, a "status change" detection problem, faces the decision about what to do with this new information. Unable to ignore it, she decides to move on to a new, more promising environment, while placing the responsibility for her decision with ... the money: Money made me do it. This is not new. We keep hearing this phrase ever since money was invented. ( Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov example ).
There seems to be a perception that money has at least some degree of control over people's actions. This feeling comes from our everyday experiences, because even the humbliest of us use money to control other people's behaviour. For example, a dollar bill given to a shopkeeper makes him part with a pound of apples. A coin dropped into a vending machine produces a candy. Like classic Pavlovian dogs, people and machines respond to money stimuli. ( maybe more example here ...).
Controlling somebody's actions or likewise being controlled by money signals in everyday exchanges, we learn to associate money with external control. Thus, when we make a decision triggered by a status change measured in money, we produce the conditional response: money made me do it.
== it's more of an instrumental conditioning, or a combination of classic and instrumental conditioning.
Another example of how people tend to see money as a conscious actor that has the ability to directly influence their lives. As if money, not they themselves, made the decision to part with old friends and seek some new more promising connections. Why is that so? What is this unique property of a rather simple exchange medium that makes us perceive it as an external force instead of what it really is: a simple piece of colored paper or a number on a bank statement?
In this particular case money plays the role of an easily accessible success quantifier. A person, having solved, either consciously or subconsciously, a "status change" detection problem, faces the decision about what to do with this new information. Unable to ignore it, she decides to move on to a new, more promising environment, while placing the responsibility for her decision with ... the money: Money made me do it. This is not new. We keep hearing this phrase ever since money was invented. ( Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov example ).
There seems to be a perception that money has at least some degree of control over people's actions. This feeling comes from our everyday experiences, because even the humbliest of us use money to control other people's behaviour. For example, a dollar bill given to a shopkeeper makes him part with a pound of apples. A coin dropped into a vending machine produces a candy. Like classic Pavlovian dogs, people and machines respond to money stimuli. ( maybe more example here ...).
Controlling somebody's actions or likewise being controlled by money signals in everyday exchanges, we learn to associate money with external control. Thus, when we make a decision triggered by a status change measured in money, we produce the conditional response: money made me do it.
== it's more of an instrumental conditioning, or a combination of classic and instrumental conditioning.