New research published in Science magazine by Kathleen D Vohs and colleagues at the University of Minnesota measured the effect that thinking about money has on our behaviour. They found that although money makes us more self-sufficient, it also makes us more selfish.

Vohs’ subjects were first asked to perform a word descrambling task that could be resolved to generate either neutral phrases or phrases that would activate the financial centres of their brain. The experimenter then tested the volunteer’s self-sufficiency by giving them a puzzle to solve. Thinking about money seems to make us more independent and less likely to call for assistance.

But does it also make us less likely to help others? To test this, the volunteers were given the opportunity of helping another subject who apparently couldn’t complete their task. The money-primed subjects were willing to spend only half as much time helping than the neutral-primed subjects. They were also less willing to perform simple helpful tasks. Not surprisingly, this relative unhelpfulness spilled over into financial dealings.

The results echoed earlier work that examined whether students of economics were more self-interested than other students. John Carter and Michael Irons from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, tested student performance in “the ultimate bargaining game”. It seems that studying money makes you less generous, or perhaps the discipline attracts less generous people who give less and expect less in return.

Jonathan Swift said that “a wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart”, but fictional misers like Scrooge tend to be cold-hearted as well as tight-fisted. Vohs also tested whether exposure to money causes subjects to become less sociable. Money may make the world go around but it doesn’t make new friends. Exposure to money made Vohs’ subjects unsociable in several other ways.

So although money may not be the root of all evil, the love of it does make us more cantankerous. The results would probably not have surprised Dickens, but it may be something we overlook when we emphasise the importance of teaching children the value of money.