Does making more money makes us give less? As we make more money, the more tight fisted we become. (Research)

Care to give: Studies find that getting richer often means getting stingier and lonelier because people require communities less as they become wealthier

A recent study shows that the more wealth a person gains, the more likely they are to become both stingier and lonelier.

Patricia Greenfield studied a Mexican village for forty years and watched its residents grow progressively distant from one another as they became richer. And she says the same thing has happened to the United States as a nation.

By surveying the contents of a million books printed between 1800 and 2000, Greenfield found that Americans have used progressively fewer words like ‘give’ and more like ‘get’ over the last 200 years, indicating a serious trend toward individualism she says is all because of money.

‘The frequency of the word “get” went up, and the frequency of the word “give” went down,’ 

Greenfield, a researcher with UCLA’s department of Psychology, used Google’s Ngram viewer to assess changes in word use over the years.

‘Words that would show an individualistic orientation became more frequent,’ Greenfield said. ‘Examples of those words were “individual,” “self,” “unique.” Words that would represent a more communal or more family orientation went down in frequency. Some examples of those words are “give,” “obliged,” “belong.”’

Greenfield’s findings also use her forty years of tracking families in Chiapas, Mexico, where she found that as villagers grew richer, tendencies toward individualism grew stronger and community bonds became weaker.

So sad! the more we have the less kindness we seem to show. That’s not right and yet this is true even in Nigeria, Lagos inclusive.

Just as our words show who we are, our writings have been known to tell the kinds of people we are.

When we give, it takes nothing from us but rather adds to us. It makes us feel good and brings a sense of worth.