Many things can get in the way of being with others: insisting on being right, skin color, etc., but one of the most destructive can be money. The old saying, "You can’t buy love," could be restated,"love of others and love of money are opposites that exists in the same space."

Dr. Kathleen Vohs has found some interesting aspects about being "money-primed people." Money-primed people are those that have been given several visual and linguistic clues to think about money. After being exposed to money thinking inducing symbols, they were more selfish, more individualistic and less social. The effects her team looked at were small doses of mammon’s symbols. One can only speculate the effects of long term exposure to mammon.

The details of her findings are telling. Given a task to set up an interview with others, the money-primed people set up the chairs farther apart than those without the exposure to money symbols. They did not help when a researcher dropped the pencils. Given impossible problems to solve, they stayed longer at the project than non money-primed people. In other words, they were stubborn even in the face of truth. This was just a small dose of money priming.

Vohs’s team discovered what Charles Dickens wrote about in the Christmas Carol through the character of Scrooge. Money isolates and makes one less likely to be with another. It kills love. It makes people into misers. While this is beyond her findings, coloring in the picture further, one can see in fiction and in experience why "money-primed" people are more dictatorial, controlling and often have disastrous personal relationships.

Many of the supporters of mammon tells us that the love of money motivates us. Science again tested this theory. Best-selling author Daniel Pink presented this research in his book, "Drive." He found money not only does not make us creative producers of innovation, but actually works against innovation. It makes us less creative, but better at making money. The verdict of science is that Mammon does us no good.