Over the next number of weeks, I plan to have several posts on behavioural economics. Behavioural economics has a different view of what constitutes economic man than neoclassical economics and it attempts to apply insights from psychology as well as neuroscience to economics.
Kathleen Vohs has done some interesting work on the psychological consequences of money. She and her co-authors have conducted a series of experiments where they find that money changes people's motivation for the better and their behaviour towards others for the worse. You can read their short paper, which was published in Science, here. Below is a video where Vohs talks about this study. The implications of this study for employers and wider society are potentially very huge.