Money and Chocolate

“The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.” So said Thomas Jefferson, who perhaps had chocolate in mind when he declared that, along with life and liberty, an independent America would be dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. But, alas, Jefferson died too soon to experience the full gestalt of chocolate. Two years after his death, Dutchman Conrad van Houten was pressing the fat from the cacao bean, which led to cacao powder. By 1849 English chocolate makers were mixing in sugar, added back the cacao butter, and created a solid eating chocolate. The chocolate bar was born. In 1875 the Swiss chocolatier Daniel Paten added powdered milk to create milk chocolate, a process he sold, unwisely it would seem, to his neighbor Henri Nestle. Thus, had Jefferson lived long enough, he would undoubtedly have been the most adulatory of chocolate choristers.

Still, by Jefferson’s time, chocolate had long since spread from the three chests full of cacao beans Hernando Cortez had brought back to Spain from his New World conquistadoring, and had become the drink of choice throughout Europe and the United States. Now, Jefferson most certainly knew that consuming chocolate produced both alertness and an exquisite glow of feel-good contentment. What he did not know was why. He did not know that chocolate contained more than 300 chemical ingredients, including a host of stimulants which elbowed dozing neurotransmitters awake to powered on the brain’s reward circuit toggle switch. However, a two-part study published in the August 2010 issue of Psychological Science suggests that money, indeed, just the mere sight of money, can hobble that reward circuitry and mute its mellow pleasure.

The study, titled “Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness,” sought to examine the effect of money on everyday happiness, the small scale “little good things,” according to coauthor Elizabeth Dunn. It found that the purchasing power of wealth diminished the ability to enjoy the things purchased. But here’s where things get interesting for chocolate connoisseurs everywhere. For the second portion of the study, the researchers recruited 40 participants of various ages from the University of British Columbia and asked them to complete a questionnaire. Half of the questionnaires included a picture of Canadian money; the other half, a neutral picture. Before beginning the questionnaire, participants were given a small chocolate bar. Those subconsciously primed by the picture of money spent 13 seconds less eating their chocolate than those whose questionnaire contained a neutral picture. The researchers interpreted this time differential as indicating the money-primed participants savored the chocolate less and, adding this finding to the first part of the study, concluded that, because having money “giveth” one access to life’s extravagant pleasures, it “taketh away” the gratifying satisfaction of life’s smaller, more quotidian pleasures.

Quod est demonstratum: money attenuates, diminishes, dwindles, muffles, dilutes, parches, and impoverishes the wealthy’s sense of well-being. They can’t get no satisfaction. Let that be a lesson to us all. Money cannot buy happiness. Science says. Even has a term for it: “hedonic adaptation.” We get used to pleasure; its presence becomes a prelude to its absence. In the cage match between phenylethylamine—the so-called “chocolate amphetamine—and money, the chemical is apparently headed for an inevitable smackdown by Mammon.

Now, I am a fan of science. It rifts to the truth of things, what they are and how they work. But this chocolate study seems to me a cocktail frank in the buffet of science; a sciencey vuvuzela, designed for noisy fanfare rather than empirical music. It looks like science, has a kind of scienciness to it, but, really, for me, it offers about as much insight as saying that human hips evolved to operate hula hoops. In short, this study makes me dubious.

Consider, first, that the study participants were given chocolate, while in the real world people purchase chocolate. They use money to buy it, and buy it they do: In the United States, $7 billion is spent on chocolate. Americans eat 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate each year, nearly 12 pounds for every man, woman, and child. Hedonic adaptation? Seems more like hedonic absorption.

Consider, second, that, extending the logic of the study, we are forced to conclude that only the most impoverished persons can truly enjoy what they purchase, a cankered thought, surely. After all, if money is an instrument to procure pleasure, and, as the study purports to show, the procurement of pleasure reduces that pleasure, then those with less money must therefore experience more pleasure because they procure less. By the same logical token, the study suggests that, to truly enjoy life’s most positive experiences, we should forego the effort to accumulate wealth, which, given the reality of human nature, is about as likely as a rabbit pulling a magician out of a hat. Would anyone, anyone, refuse wealth because it would undermine their ability to savor life’s little pleasures? Besides, can it possibly be true that the wealthy are condemned to such ho-hum lives? Surely they, like anyone, take pleasure in a child’s laugh, in a gesture of friendship, in the caress of a loved one, in a day filled with sunshine and blue air and summer water, in a cardinal perched like a beating heart in the center of a treetop, in ice cream on a hot day, in heroism and loyalty and excellence in action.

Consider, third, whether a subjective response like savoring is reducible to raters with stop watches timing how long the chocolate remains in the mouth. Does not the savor of something vary with the individual and the context? I will suck on a hard candy until it is a thin wafer of barely connected molecules. My wife Kathy immediately crunches it for a burst of flavor. Do we not, each in our own way, savor the candy equally? Pinning savoriness to the second hand of a stop watch serves the quantifying purpose of the experiment, but it hardly reflects the rhythms and expressions of individual taste.

Consider, finally, that the study, while guaranteeing its publication and circulation in the cultural discourse by its tie-in to the intellectually fashionable happiness studies, actually proves little. Has it ever been doubted that any experience, once it becomes familiar, loses its glamour? Indeed, what the study does confirm, in its authors’ conclusion that wealth dilutes the capacity to savor life’s small delights, is a social jealousy that salves itself by reversing the hierarchy of privilege. Those of us not wealthy want to believe that those who are are less happy. We want to lower them in a way that elevates us. “Sure,” the authors’ interpretation permits us to say, “they may have sky boxes at the Super Bowl, may wear Kiton suits and Marc Jacob dresses, may drink Cristal Brut champagne and snack on Almas Beluga caviar, may summer in the Hamptons and vacation in Oahu, but their lives are less fulfilling, a parade of etceteras, a brochure of unmet gratifications.” Money corrodes and corrupts, the authors effectually say, telling us a tale that Fitzgerald and Dickens told, that Chaucer’s “The Friar’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale” told, that St. Augustine told, that Jesus Christ told, that the prophets predating the establishment of Christendom itself told, telling us something nobody did not already know, telling us, really, not a scientific but a rather commonplace moral tale, a well-rehearsed parable, really, as the vaguely Biblical resonance of the study’s title suggests.

But most troubling to me, a chocolate acolyte of the highest order, most seriously disturbing and upsetting, is the profanation of chocolate by reducing it to empirical quantification. Such an act traduces the beatific experience of chocolate. It blasphemes chocolate, which, as anyone who eats chocolate can tell you, is proof positive that a Divine Beneficence pervades the universe. Chocolate is the anodyne for the wagging finger and shaking fist of life. Chocolate is the meme of indulgent self-reward, of you-deserve-itism, a pleasure which only the most obdurate, implacable Calvinist could deny. Chocolate is poetry, not prose. It is neural swashbuckling, cortical jubilee, limbic rapture; it is the brain’s Honilee frolic. Chocolate is the vegetable no children would leave scattered and unfinished on their plates. Chocolate gives itself over to us with such sweet and easy melt-in-your-mouth abandon, its melting point of just under 98.6 the near perfect match for the July-ed state of our own internal summer. Chocolate is the self fully mustered and standing at attention on life’s parade ground. Chocolate has its trailblazers and heroes and poets and canon of saints—Callibaut, Favarger, Hershey, Lindt, Ghirardelli, Ferrero. Chocolate resonates with graspable nowness, with the nectared instant; it is an urgent, seizing impulse that ignites the moment. Chocolate’s meaning is embodied, sacramental, undiagrammable. Chocolate is a dance under the moon; it is an unfolded petal of gladness; it is haloed felicity; it is amen and hallelujah. Chocolate is pure pleasure’s pure pleasure. Chocolate is not, cannot be, never has been nor never will be, encompassed by the numbed language of data sets in an experiment that offers a simulacrum of experience and an explanation of questionable value. Money may “taketh away” that which it “giveth.” Chocolate simply, and only, giveth.

Here’s the link to the study: http://harvard.academia.edu/JordiQuoidbach/Papers/430601/Money_giveth_money_taketh_away_The_dual_effect_of_money_on_happiness