blo gs.e dwe e k.o rg http://blo gs.edweek.o rg/edweek/civic_missio n/2013/11/understanding_the_co gnitive_demands_o f_po verty_o n_o ur_students.html? print=1
Understanding the Cognitive Demands of Poverty on our Students By Sam Chaltain o n No vember 15, 2013 9:42 AM
Guest post by Z ac Chase New Jersey shoppers and Indian sugarcane f armers might have something to teach us about poverty and cognitive load. An article in the August issue of the magazine Science examined the possibilities of a causal ef f ect between considerations of poverty and study participants' abilities to perf orm cognitively-demanding tasks. T he authors set out to examine the common belief that poverty reduces cognitive capacity and "suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less f or other tasks." Being poor, in other words, results in worrying about being poor, and that leads to f olks not having as much room to worry or think about other things. T he researchers approached the study f rom two dif f erent perspectives. First, they asked shoppers at a New Jersey mall to consider two dif f erent f inancial situations. T he f irst "hard" situation included asking participants what they would do f aced with a $1,500 expense f or a car repair. T he second "easy" situation centered around a $150 car repair. When triggered to consider a "hard" situation and then complete two dif f erent cognitive tests, poor participants perf ormed signif icantly worse than their richer counterparts. In the f ace of the easy, $150 scenario, there was no signif icant dif f erence between the results of rich and poor participants. For teachers, this could have interesting implications. Students who are living with persistent poverty or experiencing temporary poverty could exhibit similar results when asked to complete academic work. In some situations, it's been suggested that students be of f ered f inancial incentives in return f or improved perf ormance. T he researchers' results, however, suggest that incentivizing results will not improve perf ormance, or that any gains that do occur will eliminate the breach between rich and poor students. Again, when study participants completed the cognitive tests while considering the "easy" scenario, there was no signif icant dif f erence based on income. Put another way, neither the poor nor the rich participants were inherently better or worse at the tasks, but it was consideration of monetary hardships that appeared to sap their cognitive abilities. Taking things out of the lab, the researchers turned to sugarcane f armers in India, and asked them to perf orm similar cognitive tasks prior to and f ollowing their annual harvests. Traditionally, during the pre-harvest period, f armers must take out loans, pawn their belongings, and take other measures to make ends meet. Postharvest, though, they experience a substantial inf lux of cash that eliminates the need f or these larger measures. Not surprisingly, when f armers didn't need to worry about their economic state, their response times and errors in the researchers' cognitive tests dropped signif icantly while their accuracy in answering rose signif icantly. 1
Not having to worry about money, it seems, means an increased ability to handle a larger cognitive load. Assuming these variables create a similar ef f ect when applied to students in the classroom who are also living in poverty, this study raises some important questions f or educators. How might we change our practices with this knowledge? What actions might we take to acknowledge the importance of f inancial security f or the f amilies we serve? Perhaps extending the school day f or poor students who struggle academically might not be as helpf ul a measure as coordinating a f inancial advisor, local career coach, and continuing education opportunities f or parents so that they might better secure the f inancial outlook of our students. In the meantime, the study's researchers point out, "Filling out long f orms, preparing f or a lengthy interview, deciphering new rules, or responding to complex incentives all consume cognitive resources." Perhaps we could start by being more mindf ul of how of ten we ask our students to complete similar tasks and realize there is a better way. Follow Z ac on Twitter.
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o pinio nat o r.blo gs.nyt im e s.co m http://o pinio nato r.blo gs.nytimes.co m/2013/09/25/escaping-the-cycle-o f-scarcity/?_php=true&_type=blo gs&hp&_r=1
Escaping the Cycle of Scarcity By TINA ROSENBERG
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work. “Scarcity” is a new book that does something that I didn’t think possible: it says something new about why people are poor — and what to do about it.
Worrying about money when it is tight captures our brains. It reduces our cognitive capacity.
Here’s what’s not new: Poor people have more self -destructive habits than middle-class people. T he poor don’t plan f or the f uture as much. Compared to middle-class people, the poor have less self -control and are quicker to turn to instant gratif ication. T hese habits perpetuate a cycle of poverty. T his is proven. T he controversy is why it is the case. For conservatives, roughly speaking, these behaviors cause poverty. For liberals, also roughly speaking, poverty in many ways causes these behaviors. It is easy to see how the stresses of poverty weigh in. With eating habits, f or example: f ruit and vegetables cost more that many unhealthier f oods, and might not be available in a poor neighborhood. But there are behaviors the liberal view struggles to explain. Even when healthy f oods are available and made cheap, f or example, poor people take advantage of them f ar less. Now Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard economist, and Eldar Shaf ir, a psychologist at Princeton, propose a way to explain why the poor are less f uture-oriented than those with more money. According to these authors, one explanation f or bad decisions is scarcity — not of money, but of what the authors call bandwidth: the portion of our mental capacity that we can employ to make decisions. Worrying about money when it is tight captures our brains. It reduces our cognitive capacity — especially our abstract intelligence, which we use f or problem-solving. It also reduces our executive control, which governs planning, impulses and willpower. T he bad decisions of the poor, say the authors, are not a product of bad character or low native intelligence. T hey are a product of poverty itself . Your natural capability doesn’t decrease when you experience scarcity. But less of that capacity is available f or use. If you put a middle-class person into a situation of scarcity, she will behave like a poor person. T he authors and two colleagues had a team of researchers approach shoppers at a mall in New Jersey. People were asked about their income and then classif ied (without their knowledge) as either poor or rich. T hen they were asked a question: your car needs a repair that will cost you $150. You can take a loan, pay in f ull, or postpone service. How do you go about making this decision? Af ter they answered, the subjects took tests that measured f luid intelligence and cognitive control. Poor and rich people did equally well on the test. But then the researchers changed one thing: instead of needing $150 f or the repair, they would need $1,500. T he rich subjects did as well on the intelligence and willpower tests as they had bef ore. T he poor group did not. 3
T heir scores dropped the equivalent of losing 13 or 14 IQ points — larger than the drop experienced by people who had just stayed up all night. T hinking about how to come up with $150 didn’t af f ect them. But thinking about coming up with $1,500 eroded their intelligence more than if they had been seriously sleep-deprived. T his result isn’t particular to New Jersey. T he same team studied sugar cane f armers in India, testing their intelligence just af ter the harvest, when they were f lush with cash, and bef ore it, when they were poor. T he same f armers got 25 percent more questions right on the intelligence test when they were rich, and made 15 percent more errors on the executive control test when they were poor. Isn’t this just stress? We know how harmf ul stress can be. But Mullainathan and Shaf ir argue that the ef f ects of scarcity go f urther. Its capture of our brains leads people into a tunnel; your only f ocus is solving the emergency of the moment. If the rent is due, you use money that would have gone to the car payment. T he f act that this will end in getting your car repossessed, and theref ore losing your job, doesn’t really register. You take very little notice of what’s outside the tunnel. In this way, scarcity creates a vicious circle. Tunneling leads people to borrow to deal with the emergency expense. For the poor, borrowing is very costly. T hey take high-interest payday loans, buy on installment, pay large credit-card f ees and interest. T hey “borrow” by paying bills late, which means they pay a substantial portion of their income in late f ees and reconnection f ees. T hese consequences, however, lie outside the tunnel — until paying those bills becomes the new emergency. T he authors designed complicated games to simulate conditions of scarcity. One was a version of the T V game show “Family Feud,” played by Princeton students assigned at random to either have a lot of time to answer questions or just a little. When researchers allowed players to borrow time f rom their f uture rounds at high rates of interest, the time-poor players borrowed prof ligately, and their scores plummeted. When the loans could be rolled over — simulating real-world debt traps — the time-poor did even worse. Mullainathan and Shaf ir write that the same mentality of scarcity that applies to the cash-poor also applies to people who are overly busy and those who are dieting. People short of time also tunnel, borrowing time by postponing projects that are tomorrow’s emergency but not today’s. And being hungry captures the mind in a way similar to being poor. People who are on strict diets spend a lot of their bandwidth thinking about f ood. T he scarcity phenomenon is good news because to a certain extent, we can design our way around it. Awareness of the psychology of scarcity and the behavioral challenges it yields “can go some way toward improving the modest returns of anti-poverty interventions,” Mullainathan and Shaf ir write. Here are some examples: Automate good decisions. Since we can’t be counted on to make good choices when we’re in the tunnel, we can make them automatic. One decision to automate your choices will eliminate all those f uture opportunities to screw up. One way is to switch the def ault. For example, instead of making enrolling in a 401(k) savings plan voluntary, make not enrolling voluntary. T his simple change has produced spectacular increases in usage of 401(k)s, organ donation and AIDS testing. It can be used f or many outside-the-tunnel decisions, like building savings: sign up to have part of your paycheck automatically deposited into a savings account. You can still get at it, but you have to take steps to do so. Provide better options for borrowing. Employers of minimum wage workers of ten complain that these workers are unprepared f or their jobs, unf riendly to customers and distracted. Part of the reason may be that they are devoting little bandwidth to their jobs because they are worrying about how to live on their wages.
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T he theories in “Scarcity” support the idea that paying them a living wage would increase productivity. But since some employers may balk at this, the book proposes a smaller step: remove some of the penalties that come with borrowing. Since poor people of ten have an urgent need f or small sums, they take a lot of payday loans. T hese loans, some of which have interest rates of more than 300 percent, cost workers hundreds of dollars in f ees. T hey are a scam designed to trap people in cycles of debt — 85 percent of payday loans go to people who take seven or more loans each year. (See this report (pdf ) f or a thorough explanation of their horrors, and this column by Tom Edsall.) One solution is to spread credit unions. Another is to expand workplace-based f inancial counseling and services, like Neighborhood Trust‘s innovative Employer Solution. Employers can help by paying weekly instead of bi-weekly, and by of f ering loans themselves with reasonable interest rates. Better yet, a portion of the repayment could go automatically into a savings account f or each worker, so they could eventually borrow f rom themselves.
Relat ed
More From Fixes Read previous contributions to this series. Internationally, we now know that microcredit loans are of ten used to cover personal emergencies, not to start businesses. T hey are not well-suited to this, as they are usually too large and take too much time to get. (T his is why even people with access to microcredit continue to go to pawn brokers and loan sharks.) Dhanei KGFS, a f inancial services provider in Orissa, India, pioneered a successf ul new product: small, low-interest emergency loans that clients of their bank had pre-qualif ied f or and could get at any time of day or night, nearly instantly. Design services for the poor to take up less bandwidth. We know the poor are short of cash; we design f or that (most of the time). But we don’t think about their scarcity of bandwidth, and that should inf luence services as well. One good model is Single Stop, which operates more than 90 sites around the country where low-income people can apply f or benef its, do their taxes and get legal and f inancial advice. Structure incentives to put them inside the tunnel. Since scarcity f orces us to tunnel, and concentrate only on what’s inside that tunnel, incentives and penalties will work best when they can be inside, too. T his means very short deadlines and quick rewards — perhaps in several installments. Telling people they can be on welf are f or only f ive years isn’t ef f ective. T hat deadline might not become part of the tunnel until they hit f our years and 11 months — too late to start looking f or a job. Mullainathan and Shaf ir call this the worst of both worlds: “it penalizes but f ails to motivate,” they write. T he same phenomenon explains why the death penalty, the three-strikes law and other harsh punishments f ail to deter criminals. No matter how harsh they are, they are f ar enough away to lie outside the tunnel.
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T hese design shif ts — the authors and others propose more of them on the behavioral economics site www.ideas42.org — are a small solution to a very big problem. But the theory is a new one. It needs more study — but part of that exploration will be trying out dif f erent models of antipoverty services that take bandwidth scarcity into account. It is f ar f rom the only reason people are poor, of course, but what’s particularly usef ul about the idea of scarcity is that it is overarching; ease that burden, and people will be better able to deal with all the rest. Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes. To receive e-mail alerts for Fixes columns, sign up at here. Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”
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psm ag.co m
http://www.psmag.co m/navigatio n/business-eco no mics/po o r-makes-po o r-66414/
How Being Poor Makes You Poor New research shows how poverty can of ten be a self -perpetuating trap. Why are the rich rich and the poor poor? It’s a question that gets asked a lot, and a question we should continue asking. Do the wealthy simply work harder and f or longer hours? Are they more willing to take risks and make sacrif ices, while the destitute tend to sleep in past 10:00 a.m. and splurge all their cash on Cool Ranch Doritos Tacos f rom Taco Bell? Or is it more circumstantial—meaning, are the haves f orged in homes where education is valued and opportunity abundant, while the have nots come f rom generation af ter generation of just scraping by? According to the BBC, income inequality in the U.S. has grown f or nearly three decades, and in 2012 this disparity reached record-breaking proportions when the top one percent of U.S. earners collected 19.3 percent of all household income. For some policymakers and members of the public, this is a problem—and it’s a problem that cannot properly be addressed without examining both the personal and systemic reasons f or why some end up so rich while others end up so poor. New research f rom a behavioral economist at Harvard and a cognitive psychologist at Princeton might help untangle this ongoing conundrum, if only just a strand or two. In their recently released book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shaf ir suggest that those living paycheck to paycheck aren’t as much in their situation because they’re bad f inancial planners with a history of self sabotage, but rather that they’re bad f inancial planners with a history of self -sabotage because of their situation. It’s a subtle yet signif icant shif t. Relying on data collected f rom numerous tests and experiments, the co-authors argue that the mental toll of constantly having to deliberate over which credit card should be paid down f irst or jar of peanut butter placed into the shopping cart depending on the sale both depletes one’s cognitive resources and diminishes the importance of planning f or tomorrow, since today’s demands f eel just so damn demanding. In other words, when you’re struggling with the necessity of treading water, the ability to calculate which shoreline is closest becomes a luxury.
“The poor and t he rich perf orm equally well in one cont ext , and t hen when you impose t he cont ext of scarcit y, all of a sudden [t he poor] perf orm less well, even t hough it ’s t he same people.” “Give your computer 16 programs to run at once, and everything slows down,” Shaf ir told me. “It’s just doing too much at once.” But enough with the metaphors. On to the empirical evidence. IN ONE EXPERIMENT, T HE authors asked participants to imagine that their car required a repair costing $300, which they could either pay f or immediately, take out a loan to cover, or ignore completely. T he authors then provided the participants with a series of computer-based questions intended to measure their capacity f or logical thinking, cognitive f unction, and problem solving. All of the participants, whether rich or poor, demonstrated a similar level of intelligence. 7
However, when the authors repeated this experiment using a repair costing $3,000, the poor f ared f ar worse than the rich, sometimes dropping up to 13 IQ points, or the equivalent of one night’s sleep. In a f ield study, Mullainathan and Shaf ir provided sugar cane f armers in India with psychological tests both right bef ore the harvest, when most had little money, and just af ter the harvest, when most were temporarily af f luent. T he results went as expected: the f armers perf ormed much better on the tests post-harvest. Based on their f indings, then, it appears that the presence of scarcity somehow creates tunnel vision in the brain. While this outlook helps f ocus the mind on urgent issues, it also clouds any and all appointments, errands, and aspirations currently residing on the periphery. A lif e of poverty, then, tends to perpetuate poverty. “Mental bandwidth is what we use to devote attention, make decisions, and resist temptation—it’s what psychologists call ‘proactive memory,’” Shaf ir said. “It’s long been know that proactive memory is hurt when you load your working memory. If you have to remember a seven-digit number, f or example, you will remember less of what you need to do. Just by loading your bandwidth and your working memory, you’ll do many things wrong.” And yet the authors’ research isn’t limited to the poor and their lack of money, either. In Scarcity, Mullainathan and Shaf ir argue that this narrowed mindset can occur in anyone f or a multitude of reasons, whether it’s through a dearth of time, f ood, or f riendship. No one is immune. “We’re very caref ul to point out that this is not about poor people—this is about people who inhabit the context of poverty,” Shaf ir said. “T hink about being hungry. If you’re hungry, that’s what you think about. You don’t have to strain f or years—the minute you’re hungry, that’s where your mind goes.” FOR CRIT ICS WHO INSIST that the authors have indeed conf used the order of cause and ef f ect—that the poor are poor because they lack intelligence and willpower, à la Romney’s 47 percent, and not the other way around—Shaf ir maintains that’s simply not the case. “In some sense, the most exciting part of our studies is that whatever it is you think made people poor, what I know is that everything we’re getting has to do very clearly with the context of being poor, not with the people themselves,” Shaf ir said. “T he poor and the rich perf orm equally well in one context, and then when you impose the context of scarcity, all of a sudden [the poor] perf orm less well, even though it’s the same people.” While what the authors are describing is somewhat dif f erent than stress—which, in the right quantities, can be a benef icial f orce f or completing a task—all of this might seem rather obvious to those who live in chronic poverty or have undergone a period of f inancial hardship. Being broke is tough. Not only does a lack of money restrict what you can do, but now your survival also involves an endless amount of compromise over the most basic of goods and services. To return to the bandwidth metaphor, it’s like browsing the Internet while your computer downloads a f ile, ad inf initum. It’s impossible to stop dwelling on unpaid utility bills when you have absolutely no idea how you’re going to pay them. But judging by America’s polarized political landscape, what’s commonsense to some isn’t common to all. In light of this, Shaf ir says he hopes the data will create an “empathy bridge” between the opposing camps, and perhaps also demystif y the poor’s plight f or some policymakers in Washington. Practical solutions the authors of f er include automatically depositing wages into savings accounts and pill bottles that glow when they haven’t been opened in a while. Basically, anything that serves to liberate bandwidth.
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As f ormer U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says in the upcoming documentary f ilm Inequality for All, “Of all developed nations, the United States has the most unequal distribution of income, and we’re surging toward even greater inequality.” It’s a trajectory toward prosperity f or some and ruin f or the rest. Although Mullainathan and Shaf ir’s research certainly doesn’t address every f acet related to this growing disparity, it does directly conf ront the complicated question of why the poor have such a dif f icult time, as some like to say, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Paul Hiebert is the editor of Ballast, a Canadian-centric Website about culture and politics. Follow him on Twitter @hiebertpaul.
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he alt hland.t im e .co m http://healthland.time.co m/2013/08/30/ho w-financial-wo es-change-yo ur-brain-and-no t-fo r-the-better/print/
How Financial Woes Change Your Brain (And Not for the Better) Aug. 30, 2013 Brad Killer / Getty Images
Relat ed Worrying about making ends meet, it seems, can occupy enough of the brain‘s f inite thinking power that it makes it dif f icult to think clearly. According to the latest research published in Science, just thinking about shaky f inances can drop IQ by the equivalent of 13 points. T hat may help to explain why poverty can become a vicious cycle, with lower income people tending to make seemingly irrational and risky decisions, particularly when it comes to money. To determine how budgetary concerns af f ect thinking, the researchers examined the ef f ects of f inancial strain among both a group of shoppers at a New Jersey mall and impoverished sugarcane f armers in rural India. T he mall visitors had household incomes ranging f rom $20,000 to $150,000, with a median income of $70,000. T he f armers were relatively f lush with cash at harvest— but desperately poor f or most of the rest of the year. T he shoppers considered a range of f inancial dif f iculties, f rom having to take small pay cuts to larger ones, or to suddenly being f aced with minor or more expensive car repairs. T hey were asked about how they would cope with such problems— by borrowing, cutting spending or skipping the car repair and hoping f or the best. T hen they took tests to measure IQ and their cognitive skills. When conf ronted with relatively minor f inancial problems, the lower income people perf ormed equally well on the tests as higher income f olks. But when f aced with more serious f inancial concerns, the lower income individuals did much worse than their wealthier counterparts. In f act, in one version of the experiment where participants were paid f or each correct answer, the rich earned 18% more than those who weren’t as well of f . T he f indings among the Indian sugarcane f armers were almost as strong. T he researchers tested 464 f armers bef ore and af ter harvest, when their f inances were drastically dif f erent. When the f armers had cash af ter harvest, they perf ormed well on the cognitive tests. But bef ore harvest, when money was scarcer, they did much worse— showing a decline similar to the loss of 10 IQ points. With half the American population living f rom paycheck to paycheck, the study’s lead author Eldar Shaf ir, prof essor of psychology and public af f airs at Princeton University, says the f indings are relevant to understanding how f inancial circumstances inf luence intellectual ability. “T here’s always been this perception that the poor f unction less well,” says Shaf ir, “But it’s not the person, it’s the situation they’re in and anyone could f ind themselves there.” Previous studies have f ound the poor to be generally less productive, less attuned as parents, and to have lower IQs— f indings that are apparently linked to the stress of poverty. But those studies also lef t the impression that these f actors might be causes of poverty, while the latest research suggests that they may be the result. “T hese authors came up with very clever, elegant research designs that give us strong evidence about one cause of the sometimes counterproductive behaviors of the poor,” says Martha Farah, director of the Center f or Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not associated with the study. MORE: Why Self Disciplined People Are Happier (And Not as Deprived as You T hink)
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And while it’s tempting to think stress explained these results, that wasn’t the case. Even af ter controlling f or stress hormone levels, researchers f ound that the poor did worse. “When you don’t have enough [money], it occupies your mind and takes away bandwidth that you could use f or other things,” says Shaf ir, in explaining the f indings. And numerous studies conf irm that when mental load increases, decision-making quality goes down. T hat’s why people tend to make worse choices at the end of the day— or af ter making multiple decisions, even if some were trivial. Can you overcome the problem by not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed, or by convincing yourself that you have more mental thinking power than you actually do? While some studies f ound that such mental gymnastics could boost cognitive bandwidth, they may only work up to a point. Positive thinking alone, it seems, isn’t enough to tackle a heavy mental load. MORE: How Economic Inequality Is (Literally) Making Us Sick But actively making “space” in your brain to address challenges as they occur might be one way to avoid compromising your thinking skills. Creating routines, or def ault choices — such as what you eat f or breakf ast, or what you wear f or certain events — can leave your brain ready to take on unexpected problems without getting overwhelmed. And scheduling events that require decision-making earlier in the day, bef ore experiences and worries occupy your attention, could also help. Recognizing that worry can be distracting is also essential, so avoiding important choices when you’re f ocused on something stressf ul also makes sense, says Shaf ir. Making smart choices is about more than just being smart — it also involves being in the right state of mind to let your cognitive powers do their thing.
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t he guardian.co m
http://www.theguardian.co m/bo o ks/2013/aug/23/scarcity-sendhil-mullainathan-eldar-shafir/print
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir – review Oliver Burkeman
Indian sugar cane f armers perf ormed worse in intellegence tests pre-harvest, when money was tight, compared to post-harvest. Photograph: Amit Bhargava/Corbis
T he Guardian, Friday 23 August 2013 04.00 EDT Behind every coalition promise to "get tough on single mothers", behind every Daily Mail story about Britain's "handout culture", or Mitt Romney's notorious comments about "the 47%", there lies an assumption: that being poor is a f ailure of character. Awkwardly, f or those who f ind this obnoxious, the research sometimes makes it seem true. People who are less well-of f really do appear to give in more readily to temptation, making the very purchases they can't af f ord; to make unwise f inancial decisions; to use less ef f ective parenting techniques; or to f ail to take lif e-saving drugs, even when they're f ree. Is this a deep-seated weakness of will, made worse by a "culture of dependency"? T he Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton psychologist Eldar Shaf ir reject that idea, and some of the most f amiliar lef twing responses, too. Poverty, they argue, is indeed a matter of willpower and bad decisions, but the Mail has it back-to-f ront. It's not that f oolish choices make you poor; it's that poverty's ef f ects on the mind lead to bad choices. Living with too little imposes huge psychic costs, reducing our mental bandwidth and distorting our decisionmaking in ways that dig us deeper into a bad situation. 1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book Of course, it's hardly news that poverty creates a vicious cycle. Not having money is expensive, thanks to credit card late f ees, high interest rates on payday loans, the extra cost of buying in instalments, and so on. But the alarming conclusion of this book is how completely scarcity colonises the mind. Merely asking poorer people to contemplate a hypothetical £1,000 car repair, one study by the authors shows, impairs their perf ormance on intelligence tests as much as missing a night's sleep – about 13 or 14 IQ points. In another study, Indian sugar cane f armers perf ormed worse pre-harvest, when money was tight, compared to postharvest. "Scarcity captures the mind," explain Mullainathan and Shaf ir. It promotes tunnel vision, helping us f ocus on the crisis at hand but making us "less insightf ul, less f orward-thinking, less controlled". Wise longterm decisions and willpower require cognitive resources. Poverty leaves f ar less of those resources at our disposal.
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T heir most arresting claim is that the same ef f ects kick in – albeit not always with such grave implications – in any conditions of scarcity, not just lack of money. Chronically busy people, suf f ering f rom a scarcity of time, also demonstrate impaired abilities and make self -def eating choices, such as unproductive multi-tasking or neglecting f amily f or work. Lonely people, suf f ering f rom a scarcity of social contact, become hyper-f ocused on their loneliness, prompting behaviours that render it worse. In one sense, Mullainathan and Shaf ir concede, scarcity is so ubiquitous as to be almost meaningless. But the feeling of scarcity – of not having as much of something as you believe you need – is something more specif ic and agonising. To use the authors' f avourite metaphor, lif e under such conditions is like packing a tiny suitcase f or a trip. It entails a ceaseless f ocus on dif f icult trade-of f s: the umbrella or the extra sweater? T he greatest f reedom that money can buy is the f reedom f rom thinking about money – or, to quote Henry David T horeau, "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can af f ord to let alone". T here's a risk here of lapsing into the obvious: rich and relaxed is better than poor and time-starved. Mallainathan and Shaf ir do sometimes succumb; f inancial abundance, we are gravely inf ormed, "allows us to buy more things". Yet the strongest chapters demonstrate that the psychological ef f ects of scarcity aren't obvious at all. In certain limited ways, f or example, poverty actually conf ers cognitive benef its. Some of the classic f indings about how irrational we are when it comes to money – such as our willingness to travel across town to save £5 on a cheap toaster, but not on a f latscreen T V – apply much less to the poor. Dieters, experiencing a scarcity of f ood, are signif icantly better than others at identif ying words brief ly f lashed on a screen, provided that they're about f ood. Lonely people read f acial expressions more accurately. And timescarcity brings motivational benef its, as any journalist on a deadline could tell you. But these positive ef f ects of tunnel vision are outweighed by what the authors call "the bandwidth tax", the ways scarcity limits or distorts our skills. T his tax, they argue persuasively, explains a number of otherwise conf ounding kinds of self -def eating behaviour among those suf f ering scarcity – f rom the f ailure of poorer f armers in Af rica to weed their f ields, even though they have the time to do so and would make more money that way, to the f ailure of low-income Americans to take diabetes drugs and other medications, or to eat more healthily even when it's f inancially viable. "T he f ailures of the poor are part and parcel of the misf ortune of being poor in the f irst place," they write. It's not that poor people have less bandwidth. It's that "all people, if they were poor, would have less ef f ective bandwidth". T he bandwidth argument threatens to undermine much received political wisdom on poverty. Get-tough policies, like cutting of f access to benef its af ter a f ixed number of years, won't motivate people to f ind jobs: a deadline of several years is too distant to f eature in the calculations of people only concerned with paying the next bill. On the other hand, well-intended interventions like providing f inancial education or job-readiness training could backf ire, too. Another class to attend, another item to tick of f the to-do list – all use up more bandwidth, potentially impairing people's capacities more than improving them. How can we stop f alling into these traps? Mullainathan and Shaf ir of f er a f ew "nudge"-style suggestions. Where possible, systems should be designed so that inattentiveness leads to better outcomes, f or example by making savings schemes opt-out, not opt-in. Benef icial behaviours could be "brought inside the tunnel": the authors describe their own experiments with an "impulse savings" scheme, involving cards sold at supermarket tills, resembling gif t vouchers, but which credit the purchaser's savings account instead. And behaviours that require constant, energy-depleting vigilance (like trying to resist non-essential spending) should be replaced by one-of f actions (like automatically transf erring a percentage of your wages to a savings account). But they wisely don't pretend to of f er a comprehensive solution. T he tendrils of scarcity reach too deep into the mind. Poor people need more money, not self -help tricks.
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T he overall result is a rather odd but ultimately humane and very welcome book. Presenting itself as yet another "big idea" tome that will reveal the unexpected f orce that explains the world, Scarcity ends up reaf f irming one of the oldest truths: that what really explains the world is its division into haves and have-nots. T he clear message to those with resources – money, time, or anything else – is to resist the urge to judge those without them. If you f aced the same scarcity, Mullainathan and Shaf ir demonstrate, you'd make the same mistakes. Indeed, in some area of your lif e – if not your spending, then your work/lif e balance or your diet – you're almost certainly already doing so. • Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote is published by Canongate.
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washingt o npo st .co m http://www.washingto npo st.co m/natio nal/health-science/po verty-strains-co gnitive-abilities-o pening-do o r-fo r-bad-decisio nmaking-new-study-finds/2013/08/29/89990288-102b-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_print.html
Poverty strains cognitive abilities, opening door for bad decision-making, new study finds By Brady Dennis
Poverty consumes so much mental energy that people struggling to make ends meet of ten have little brainpower lef t f or anything else, leaving them more susceptible to bad decisions that can perpetuate their situation, according to a study published T hursday in the journal Science. “Past research has of ten blamed [poverty] on the personal f ailings of the poor. T hey don’t work hard enough; they’re not f ocused enough,” said University of British Columbia prof essor Jiaying Z hao, who co-authored the study as a Princeton University graduate student. “What we’re arguing is it’s not about the individual. It’s about the situation.” As part of the study, researchers conducted experiments on two groups of subjects: low- and middle-income shoppers in a mall in New Jersey, and sugar cane f armers in rural India. In the mall experiment, shoppers underwent a battery of tests to measure IQ and impulse control. However, half the participants were f irst given a “teaser” question — what they would do if their car had broken down and needed $1,500 worth of repairs — designed to put a pressing f inancial concerns at the f oref ront of their thoughts. In India, researchers tested the cognitive capacity and decision-making of f armers bef ore the sugar cane harvest, when they were most strapped f or money, and af terwards, when they had f ewer f inancial woes. T he results showed that people wrestling with the mental strain of poverty suf f ered a drop of as much as 13 points in their IQ — roughly the same f ound in people subjected to a night with no sleep. “Poverty is the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter,” said Harvard economist Sandhil Mullainathan, another of the study’s authors. “Picture yourself af ter an all-nighter. Being poor is like that every day.” Mullainathan said previous research of ten has assumed that poor people are poor because they are somehow less capable than others, whether inherently or because of past trauma or other environmental f actors in their lives. But, he said, what the latest study suggests is that the strain of poverty can tax the cognitive abilities of anyone experiencing it — and that those abilities return when the burden of poverty disappears. “While the poor may be experiencing a scarcity of money, at some level what they may really be experiencing is a scarcity of bandwidth, of cognitive capacity,” he said. “It’s the situation that’s creating the stress.” Z hao and Mullainathan said that their f indings, if accurate, could have prof ound implications f or public policy. For starters, policymakers “should beware of imposing cognitive taxes on the poor just as they avoid monetary taxes on the poor,” the paper states. Filling out long f orms, deciphering complicated rules or undergoing lengthy interviews can consume scarce cognitive resources. “You are captured by these monetary issues — how to pay rent, how to pay bills,” Z hao said. “As a result, you’re less attentive to other problems. You neglect other things in lif e that deserve your attention.” 15
t he guardian.co m
http://www.theguardian.co m/science/2013/aug/29/po verty-mental-capacity-co mplex-tasks/print
Poverty saps mental capacity to deal with complex tasks, say scientists Alo k Jha , science co rrespo ndent
T he strain of poverty may mean people are more likely to make bad decisions that exacerbate their f inancial problems. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Poor people spend so much mental energy on the immediate problems of paying bills and cutting costs that they are lef t with less capacity to deal with other complex but important tasks, including education, training or managing their time, suggests research published on T hursday. T he cognitive def icit of being preoccupied with money problems was equivalent to a loss of 13 IQ points, losing an entire night's sleep or being a chronic alcoholic, according to the study. T he authors say this could explain why poorer people are more likely to make mistakes or bad decisions that exacerbate their f inancial dif f iculties. Anandi Mani, a research f ellow at the Centre f or Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy at the University of Warwick, one of the f our authors of the study, said the f indings also suggest how small interventions or "nudges" at appropriate moments to help poor people access services and resources could help them break out of the poverty trap. Writing in the journal Science, Mani said previous research has f ound that poor people use less preventive health care, do not stick to drug regimens, are tardier and less likely to keep appointments, are less productive workers, less attentive parents, and worse managers of their f inances. "T he question we theref ore wanted to address is, is that a cause of poverty or a consequence of poverty?" She said the team of researchers, which included economists and psychologists in the UK and the US, wanted to test a hypothesis: "T he state of worrying where your next meal is going to come f rom – you have uncertain income or you have more expenses than you can manage and you have to juggle all these things and constantly being pre-occupied about putting out these f ires – takes up so much of your mental bandwidth, that you have less in terms of cognitive capacity to deal with things which may not be as urgent as your immediate emergency, but which are, nevertheless, important f or your benef it in the medium or longer term." To test their idea, the team carried out two sets of studies. In the f irst they approached around 400 people at random in a shopping mall in New Jersey and asked them to think about how they might solve a f inancial problem. Volunteers were given an "easy" scenario, where the cost of a car repair was around $150, and a "hard" scenario, where the repair would cost more like $1,500. While they thought about this, the volunteers took part in puzzle-based IQ tests and tasks that measured their attention. T he researchers compared the change in perf ormance in the tests f or rich and poor people across the two scenarios, with rich and poor def ined as being either side of the median US household income of $70,000 per year.
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In the second study, the team carried out IQ and attention tests on 464 sugar cane f armers in Tamil Nadu in India during cyclical conditions of relative wealth and poverty. Because of the long crop cycle f or sugar cane, f armers tend to be poor just bef ore a harvest and relatively well of f a f ew weeks af ter the harvest, when they have received their annual crop earnings. In the shopping mall experiment, rich and poor people perf ormed equally well on the "easy" scenario. But poorer people perf ormed much worse on the "hard" scenario – their average IQ was 13 points lower when they were thinking about serious f inancial troubles. "T hat's the dif f erence in IQ between a person who is a normal adult versus a chronic alcoholic," said Mani. "In terms of age, it's like an average 45-year old as opposed to an average 60-year-old. In terms of sleep loss, [the immediate impact of the mall study] is like losing a f ull night of sleep." For the Indian f armers there was a similar but smaller ef f ect. "What we did is look at the same people the month bef ore and the month af ter the harvest, and what we see is that IQ goes up, cognitive control, or errors, goes way down, and response times go way down," said Sendhil Mullainathan, a prof essor of economics at Harvard University and a co-author of the study. "T he ef f ect here is about two-thirds of the size of the ef f ect f ound in the mall study – it's at least nine or 10 IQ points, just between these months."Between these two studies, you both see the mechanism at work, and you see that, in the real world, these ef f ects are enormous.In their study, the researchers controlled f or possible mitigating f actors such as stress, quality of nutrition, available time and also the f act that people can sometimes get better at cognitive tests once they have tried them out a f ew times. Mullainathan added that "the results are not suggesting that the poor as people have less cognitive capacity but that anyone experiencing poverty would have less capacity. I realise this is basic but it is such an easy mistake to make in interpreting the conclusion." Jennif er Wild, a clinical psychologist at the University of Oxf ord, who was not involved in the study, said the latest results were novel because, previously, researchers "may have thought that environmental conditions, such as lower levels of education, explained the link between poverty and poorer perf ormance on some tasks of intelligence compared to the rich." She added that a limitation of the study was that the researchers had not studied how the f inancial questions in the shopping mall scenario had af f ected the emotional states of the participants. T he $1,500 amount in the "hard" scenario may have f ailed to inf luence the cognitive processing of participants with higher incomes because it might have been too low to be meaningf ul to them, she said. "T he f igure of $1,500 may have led to anxiety in low income participants, which could have inf luenced their perf ormance. T he study f ailed to look at af f ective state. How much anxiety did the imagined scenarios create and were their dif f erences in how anxious high and low income participants f elt, which could explain there dif f erences in perf ormance?" Mani said that the results of the study had implications f or policymakers. "When we think of poor people and design policies and programmes to help them, we are only particularly cognizant of the f act that they have less material resources," she said. "I think that programmes don't of ten appreciate that they're also, precisely because of poverty, a bit challenged in terms of the mental resources and attention that they have. To the extent that we want to make anti-poverty programmes ef f ective, we want to design them in a way that is mindf ul of that."
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T his could mean helping poorer high school students f ill in application f orms f or f inancial aid rather than leaving them to do it by themselves. Rather than assuming that many of the poor are not taking advantage of benef icial schemes through lack of motivation or interest, said Mani, help with "small nudges at the right time and limiting the amount of cognitive load that become barriers to them enrolling in the programme could make a big dif f erence." Other kinds of help could include sending text reminders to take pills or deposit money f or a specif ic savings goal they have, said Mani. "When they have 20 things that are grabbing their attention, which seem very urgent, to remind them of something that's important at the right time, that's also an ef f ective strategy."
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t he at lant ic.co m http://www.theatlantic.co m/business/archive/2013/11/yo ur-brain-o n-po verty-why-po o r-peo ple-seem-to -make-baddecisio ns/281780/
Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions And why their "bad" decisions might be more rational than you'd think. Shoppers at a f ood pantry. (Reuters) In August, Science published a landmark study concluding that poverty, itself , hurts our ability to make decisions about school, f inances, and lif e, imposing a mental burden similar to losing 13 IQ points. It was widely seen as a counter-argument to claims that poor people are "to blame" f or bad decisions and a rebuke to policies that withhold money f rom the poorest f amilies unless they behave in a certain way. Af ter all, if being poor leads to bad decision-making (as opposed to the other way around), then giving cash should alleviate the cognitive burdens of poverty, all on its own. Sometimes, science doesn't stick without a proper anecdote, and "Why I Make Terrible Decisions," a comment published on Gawker's Kinja platf orm by a person in poverty, is a devastating illustration of the Science study. I've bolded what I f ound the most moving, insightf ul portions, but it's a moving and insightf ul testimony all the way through.
I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn’t that I blow five bucks at Wendy’s. It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There’s a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there’s money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing. Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It’s why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It’s more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that’s all you get. You’re probably not compatible with them for anything long-term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long-term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.
When neuroscientists Joseph W. Kable and Joseph T. McGuire studied time, uncertainty and decision-making, they f ound that virtues like patience and self -control weren't as simple previous studies suggested. In the ubiquitous Marshmallow study, f or example, kids who ate the treat quickly were deemed impatient and kids who waited had self -control and, on the whole, went on to lead more productive lives, the study f ound. 19
But rational self -control in the real world, Kable says, isn't so black-and-white. Perhaps you have enough patience to wait an hour f or a train, or to lose one pound each week with exercise and dieting. T hat sounds responsible. But what happens if the train isn't there in 90 minutes? If you never lose weight and you're making yourself miserable with your diet? Maybe you should give up! "In this situation, giving up can be a natural — indeed, a rational — response to a time f rame that wasn’t properly f ramed to begin with," Maria Konnikova summed it up f or the Times. As Andrew Golis points out, this might suggest something even deeper than the idea that poverty's stress interf eres with our ability to make good decisions. T he inescapability of poverty weighs so heavily on the author that s/he abandons long-term planning entirely, because the short term needs are so great and the long-term gains so implausible. T he train is just not coming. What if the psychology of poverty, which can appear so irrational to those not in poverty, is actually "the most rational response to a world of chaos and unpredictable outcomes," he wrote. None of this is an argument against poorer f amilies trying to save or plan f or the long-term. It's an argument f or context. As Eldar Shaf ir, the author of the Science study, told The Atlantic Cities' Emily Badger: “All the data shows it isn't about poor people, it’s about people who happen to be in poverty. All the data suggests it is not the person, it's the context they’re inhabiting.”
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o pinio nat o r.blo gs.nyt im e s.co m http://o pinio nato r.blo gs.nytimes.co m/2014/01/04/can-upward-mo bility-co st-yo u-yo ur-health/?hp&rref=o pinio n&_r=0
Can Upward Mobility Cost You Your Health? By GREGORY E. MILLER , and EDITH CHEN and GENE H. BRODY
T he Great Divide is a series about inequality. Americans love a good rags-to-riches story. Even in an age of soaring inequality, we like to think that people can still make it big here if they work hard and stay out of trouble. T he socioeconomic reality of most of the last f our decades — stagnant wages, soaring income and wealth inequality, and reduced equality of opportunity — have dented, but not destroyed, the appeal of the American dream. T hose who do climb the ladder, against the odds, of ten pay a little-known price: Success at school and in the workplace can exact a toll on the body that may have long-term repercussions f or health. Among American children there are wide socioeconomic gaps on many dimensions of well-being: school achievement, mental health, drug use, teenage pregnancy and juvenile incarceration, to name just a f ew. Despite the risks that lower-income children f ace, we also know that a signif icant minority beat the odds. T hey perf orm admirably in school, avoid drugs and go on to college. Psychologists ref er to these children as resilient, because they achieve positive outcomes in adverse circumstances. T hey do so in part by cultivating a kind of determined persistence. Of ten with nurturing f rom a parent, relative or mentor, they set goals f or the f uture, work diligently toward them, navigate setbacks, stay f ocused on the long term and resist temptations that might knock them of f the ladder to success. Several years ago, we began studying these resilient young people, trying to f ind out if their success stories also translated into physical health benef its. We reasoned that, if disadvantaged children were succeeding academically and emotionally, they might also be protected f rom health problems that were more common in lower-income youth. As it turned out, the exact opposite was true. T hese young people were achieving success by all conventional markers: doing well academically, staying out of trouble, making f riends and developing a positive sense of self . Underneath, however, their physical health was deteriorating. Our f irst hints of this pattern came f rom a study of 489 rural Af rican-American young people in Georgia, whom one of us, Gene Brody, has been tracking f or more than 15 years. Most came f rom f amilies who were working but poor. In 2010, their average f amily income was about $12,000 a year; about half lived below the poverty line. We f ound a subgroup of resilient children who, despite these obstacles, were rated, at age 11, by their teachers as being diligent, f ocused, patient, academically successf ul and strong in social skills. We f ollowed these young people until they were 19 and studied their mental and physical health, f ocusing on depression, drug use, aggression and criminal behavior. As in past studies, those who were rated positively at age 11 had relatively f ew of these problems when they were 19. When we looked beneath the surf ace, though, these apparently resilient young people were not f aring well. Compared with others in the study, they were more obese, had higher blood pressure and produced more stress hormones (like cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline). Remarkably, their health was even worse than peers who, at age 11, had been rated by teachers as aggressive, dif f icult and isolated. T hey were at substantial risk f or developing diabetes or hypertension down the line. Edel Rodriguez
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We continued studying these youth as they transitioned into adulthood. Perhaps not surprisingly, the lowerincome youth who made it to college used f ewer drugs and drank less alcohol. To be academically competitive with their classmates, they had to stay f ocused on their schoolwork. As in the f irst study, though, their resilience was only skin deep. At age 20, the lower-income college kids had greater obesity, higher blood pressure and more stress hormones than those who did not make it to college. (T heir health was also worse than that of peers in more af f luent, educated neighborhoods.) T hese patterns mesh with other social-science f indings, which suggest that upward mobility does not always provide the expected “return on investment” when it comes to health. If we look at the lif e expectancy associated with a college education, blacks gain about f our f ewer years f rom bachelor’s degrees than do whites. In f act, black college graduates have shorter lif e expectancies than do white high school graduates. What is it about upward mobility that undermines the health of these young Americans? In our studies, most participants are the f irst in their f amilies to attend college. T hey f eel tremendous internal pressure to succeed, so as to ensure their parents’ sacrif ices have been worthwhile. Many f eel socially isolated and disconnected f rom peers f rom dif f erent backgrounds. T hey may encounter racism and discrimination. Some young people respond to the pressure by doubling down on character strengths that have served them well, cultivating an even more determined persistence to succeed. T his strategy, however, can backf ire when it comes to health. Behaving diligently all of the time leaves people f eeling exhausted and sapped of willpower. Worn out f rom having their noses to the grindstone all the time, they may let their health f all by the wayside, neglecting sleep and exercise, and like many of us, overindulging in comf ort f oods. Sherman A. James , a sociologist at Duke University, calls this single-minded determination to succeed and uncompromising work ethic, even in the f ace of overwhelming odds, “John Henryism,” af ter the legend of a black railroad worker who, in the 19th century, was said to have def eated a steam-powered drill in a steeldriving contest, only to drop dead of exhaustion. Mr. James has shown that lower-income Af rican-American men who express these traits have a greater risk f or hypertension as they age. What can we do to mitigate these negative health ef f ects? To start, schools and colleges that serve lowerincome students could provide health education, screenings and checkups as a part of their curriculum. T his would allow us to detect and address incipient health problems bef ore they become serious. Second, schools and clinics could of f er stress management programs, targeting lower-income, higher-achieving young people, to help them balance the competing demands on their minds and bodies. Finally, we could develop programs to help these young people blow of f steam in productive ways. We could pair them with mentors who have navigated similar lif e challenges and sponsor group physical activities. Of course, much more could be done: huge investments in primary education, so that kids have both the opportunity and preparedness to attend college, and f ace less social isolation, discrimination and alienation. But f or now, policy makers should do everything they can so that those young people who overcome so much to live the American dream have the health to enjoy the f ruits of their ef f orts. Gregory E. Miller and Edith Chen are professors of psychology and fellows of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Gene H. Brody is professor of human development and family studies and the director of the Center for Family Research at the University of Georgia.
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