And being skint makes you a crybaby, say profs

Being rich makes people invulnerable to pain and steels them against rejection by other people, according to trick-cyclists and whalesong specialists in China and America.

In order to discover this, a group of student recruits at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou were split up into two groups. One was given a sheaf of crisp banknotes to count, the other ordinary dull bits of paper. After this, all of them were forced to plunge their extremities into scalding 50°C water.

Those who had counted money beforehand, apparently, felt less pain than the others. And it doesn't stop there. Crafty psych prof Xinyue Zhou also devised a devilish method of inflicting social rejection on his test subjects, by making them play an online multiplayer game in which a ball was thrown around among a group of players.

Zhou rigged the game, however, so that after a cheery and inclusive period of tossing the cyber ball about, test subjects would then suddenly find that nobody would throw it to them any more - a crushing playground-outcast style experience.

Once again, though, it emerged that those who had fondled a pile of reassuring cash money prior to copping a cyber cold-shouldering laughed the rejection off. Those who hadn't, however, were left blubbing in the corner.

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