SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A study has found that there is a correlation between someone making poor long term heath decisions and them making poor long term financial decisions.
Are poor physical and financial health driven by the same underlying psychological factors? We found that the decision to contribute to a 401(k) retirement plan predicted whether an individual acted to correct poor physical-health indicators revealed during an employer-sponsored health examination. Using this examination as a quasi-exogenous shock to employees' personal-health knowledge, we examined which employees were more likely to improve their health, controlling for differences in initial health, demographics, job type, and income. We found that existing retirement-contribution patterns and future health improvements were highly correlated. Employees who saved for the future by contributing to a 401(k) showed improvements in their abnormal blood-test results and health behaviors approximately 27% more often than noncontributors did. These findings are consistent with an underlying individual time-discounting trait that is both difficult to change and domain interdependent, and that predicts long-term individual behaviors in multiple dimensions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02 2014, @08:46PM
Hoarding money is a psychological problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday July 02 2014, @09:45PM
"Hoarding" is a subjective term. In order for it to be a psychological problem IMHO, it actually has to harm the person engaging in the activity.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by n1 on Wednesday July 02 2014, @10:08PM
What if it harms other people? Hoarding vast wealth (money, food, water, property) far beyond personal needs while family, friends and neighbors starve as an example. Eating caviar and drinking Krug all alone in theit castle whilst being apathetic to everything but their own desires is surely a psychological problem.
Having no capacity for empathy or compassion, which will result in hoarding is a psychological problem in my book. Even without that, if the desire to hoard is so great you may lie, cheat and steal to obtain more of what ever it is you want. It may not be harming the person (maybe helping by satisfying desires), but it will certainly be negatively affecting, or even harming others.
This could be that hoarding is a symptom of other psychological problems, hoarding by itself may not be a psychological problem, but I struggle to believe that there are any hoarders out there that don't have any other underlying issues. These problems may or may not result in physical harm to themselves or others.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:23AM
What of that? Such behavior is a straightforward, rational decision even if you should whine otherwise. Most harmful behaviors aren't psychological problems. Instead they are routine conflicts of interest with the party taking their interests over those of others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02 2014, @10:30PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetty_Green [wikipedia.org]
Read the page on Wikpedia to learn more about the "World's Greatest Miser" per Guinness Book of World Records.
Linked there is this related entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by khallow on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:25AM
And we see in this case, that the "hoarding" in question resulted in actual harm to Hetty Green. So yes, I would agree that was a psychological problem.