Poverty reduces brainpower, study Editor's Choice Academic Journal Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Poverty reduces brainpower, study
Poverty reduces brainpower, it uses up so much mental energy that there is much less brainpower left to address other areas of life, researchers reported in the journal Science.
Consequently, poor people are more prone to making bad decisions and mistakes, which can worsen and prolong their poverty.
The researchers, from Harvard and Princeton universities in the USA, the University of Columbia, Canada, and the University of Warwick, UK, said that their study "presents a unique perspective regarding the causes of persistent poverty".
The state of being poor undermines a person's ability to concentrate properly on the avenues they should follow to improve their standard of living.
The daily struggle to cope with the immediate effects of not having enough money - such as cutting costs, and begging and borrowing to pay bills - has a detrimental effect on cognitive function.
It is harder in poverty to manage your time
An individual who lives in poverty ends up with fewer "mental resources" to concentrate on complicated, less immediate matters such as job training and education. Poverty robs people of the ability to manage their time.
After performing a number of experiments, the investigators found that financial worries had an immediate negative impact on a poor person's performance in common logic and cognitive tests.
Poverty reduces IQ
People who were overly worried about money problems demonstrated a drop in cognitive function equivalent to a 13-point fall in IQ - a similar effect is seen when a person loses a whole night's sleep.
However, when a poor person's concerns were benign, they performed competently in the tests, said co-author Jiaying Zhao.
Zhao said:
"These pressures create a salient concern in the mind and draw mental resources to the problem itself. That means we are unable to focus on other things in life that need our attention.
Previous views of poverty have blamed poverty on personal failings, or an environment that is not conducive to success. We're arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function. The very condition of not having enough can actually be a cause of poverty."
Poverty and stress affect cognition differently
The mental burden of poverty is different from the impact of stress, explained Eldar Shafir, who was involved in the study. Stress, which studies have demonstrated can actually encourage good habits, is our response to a range of outside pressures.
This study found that immediate rather than long-term preoccupation with limited resources can be an obstacle to important yet still unrelated tasks. Going on a training course will help in the medium- to long-term prospects of an individual, but will not put food on the table today.
Training is a distant priority for many people who live in poverty
Shafir said "Stress itself doesn't predict that people can't perform well - they may do better up to a point. A person in poverty might be at the high part of the performance curve when it comes to a specific task and, in fact, we show that they do well on the problem at hand. But they don't have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems. It's the other tasks where they perform poorly."
The consequences of failing to be on top of other areas of life for a person in a hand-to-mouth existence may loom larger. Shafir said "Late fees tacked on to a forgotten rent payment, a job lost because of poor time-management - these make a tight money situation worse. And as people get poorer, they tend to make difficult and often costly decisions that further perpetuate their hardship."
The mistakes made by a poor person have greater consequences, compared to people higher up the socioeconomic ladder. Shafir explained "If you live in poverty, you're more error prone and errors cost you more dearly - it's hard to find a way out."
In the first set of studies, the investigators chose 400 people at random in a New Jersey shopping mall. Their average income was $70,000. Income ranged from very high to $20,000 per year.
The participants were asked to solve fictitious financial scenarios, for example, if there was suddenly something wrong with their car, would they repair it by paying in full, borrowing the money, or postpone the repairs. They were presented with either a "hard" or "easy" scenario - the repair would cost $1,500 or $150.
The subjects performed common cognition and fluid-intelligence tests while considering these scenarios.
The researchers divided the participants into two groups, the "poor" or "rich" group, according to their income.
The study showed that:
In the "easy" scenarios the poor group performed as well as the rich group in the tests. In the "hard" scenarios the difference was evident. Those in the poor group performed considerably worse on both cognitive tests, while the better-off participants were "unfazed".
In the second set of studies, 464 sugarcane farmers in India took part. For sugarcane farmers, the annual harvest represents 60% of their income. These farmers are usually well off just after the harvest, and poor immediately before it.
The farmers were given the same scenarios and tests. The researchers found that they performed far worse before the harvest than after it.
The team found that the effect of poverty on cognition is associated with the general influence of "scarcity". By scarcity, they refer to lack of time, money, social ties and even calories that poor people face when trying to cope. It is not about being poor, it's about living in poverty
Zhao explained that scarcity uses up "mental bandwidth" that should be going towards other concerns in life.
Zhao explained:
"These findings fit in with our story of how scarcity captures attention. It consumes your mental bandwidth. Just asking a poor person to think about hypothetical financial problems reduces mental bandwidth. This is an acute, immediate impact, and has implications for scarcity of resources of any kind.
We documented similar effects among people who are not otherwise poor, but on whom we imposed scarce resources. It's not about being a poor person - it's about living in poverty."
When you are poor you cannot decide that you have had enough and you are not going to be poor any more. Deciding that you won't give your kids dinner or pay the rent is not an option, Shafir added. It is not a choice, it is a situation in which the individual's options are extremely limited - not something found in other types of scarcity. Services for poor people should be more scarcity proof
Services for the poor should bear in mind the burden and obstacle that poverty places on an individual's time and mental resources, the researchers suggest. Aid forms should be simpler; there should be more guidance on how to receive assistance and training.
Training programs should be set up in a way that take into account the person's limited time. Unexpected absences in training programs should be more forgiving, so that when a person stumbles they have a chance to get up again.
Shafir said "You want to design a context that is more scarcity proof". He pointed out that higher-income people have access to regular support in their daily lives, including babysitters, cleaners, personal assistants, computers, etc.
Shafir explained:
"There's very little you can do with time to get more money, but a lot you can do with money to get more time. The poor, who our research suggests are bound to make more mistakes and pay more dearly for errors, inhabit contexts often not designed to help."
Poverty affects our genes - researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, found that poverty has an effect on people's genes which may contribute to their immune response.
A team from Rutgers University found that GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) rates are high among poor mothers, not because they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder, but simply because they live in poverty.
Maslov's hierarchy of needs---not all that surprising. Meeting cognitive needs is much higher on the list than most of the needs people living in poverty are dealing with. Of course, the reality is, we are trying to meet all needs at the same time but, the more you have to concentrate on the lower needs, the less time/ability you have to fulfill the higher needs.
Please let's not make more 'victims' out there....k?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
it is true....if you have to spend 8-10hours a day hunting in the wild and then another 1-2hours preparing food....that leaves what time left for anything else....same in our cast-system of today....working for 'the man' 10-12 hours a day, and affording a house keeper leaves one time at home to choose freely what to do with remaining hours...
not having a car means a lot more time waiting for buses/cabs to get to work...a commute that takes 20min by car can take upwards of 1-1/2 hours by bus....just waiting for them....to get to work by 6am one would have to catch a bus 4:30-5:00... I know this because I work with folks who do it....they make SH!T $$ and have to spend a lot of time to get to work...getting home is the same nightmare....
same thing with grocery shopping....
choice is to a certain degree....that's why the 'system' rapes folks.....take the man from his land and he starves for the 'master'..
so civilized we are....hahahahahahahahaha......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
"While Foreign Terrorists were plotting to murder and maim using homemade bombs in Boston, Democrap officials in Washington DC, Albany and here were busy watching ME and other law abiding American Citizens who are gun owners and taxpayers, in an effort to blame the nation's lack of security on US so that they could have a political scapegoat."
The one good thing we learn about that study is that if everybody had the same exact amount of money, everybody could potentially have the exact IQ. And being exact in every way is a good way to eliminate stigmas associated with one person being more capable that another person. So what we need to do is take the money from those with a slightly higher IQ so they can worry about money problems, and give it to those poor people with a lower IQ. And hopefully over a generation or two, the children of those with a higher IQ can be reduced by half, and those with a lower IQ can increase by half. Making everybody equally mediocre and equally paid. For those people with higher IQ's to invest their money disproportionately into their own children to make them smarter is very selfish.
The one good thing we learn about that study is that if everybody had the same exact amount of money, everybody could potentially have the exact IQ. And being exact in every way is a good way to eliminate stigmas associated with one person being more capable that another person. So what we need to do is take the money from those with a slightly higher IQ so they can worry about money problems, and give it to those poor people with a lower IQ. And hopefully over a generation or two, the children of those with a higher IQ can be reduced by half, and those with a lower IQ can increase by half. Making everybody equally mediocre and equally paid. For those people with higher IQ's to invest their money disproportionately into their own children to make them smarter is very selfish.
graduating college doesn't make a person 'smart', that's why college tuition is extortion
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
sayiing this.....poverty doesn't lower IQ....have wealth makes you lose your common sense. Not everyone is collecting welfare....most don't and they
are survivors....moeny is power in government eyes....and the goverment is labelling and categorizing citizens..
in Schdy...it's just plain ignorance and that what this government has produced....idiots.....except for Vince Riggi....he is a common sense people person..
Or it could just be that people with poor problem solving abilities are unlikely to make any money.
Im sure this is true--low IQ leads to poverty-- but a longitudinal study of farmers has shown their IQ to fluctuate pre and post harvest. Pre-harvest IQs, when money is tight and the belts have been tightened, are lower than post-harvest, when their bank accounts are most full in the year, IQs in the same individuals.
That does not indicate though that taking a person out of poverty would turn them into some sort of genius. It's naive to believe that both poverty and IQ aren't affected by a multitude of factors.
IQ is NOT a test for survival, self reliance etc....
IQ is just a VERY loose measure with many factors involved.....
if a man has land/cattle/chickens and the ability to use hammer/saw/nails and the ability to get water etc he has home and life..... high IQ needed? maybe to go from mud hut to wood/stone structure...but it is his all the same.
IQ is ONLY needed in preset cast system of formal schooling to get an education to find a job that society and the system agreed upon, places $$ value.....even then, those with high IQs may lack the ability to survive and also still harbor the same human predisposition to seek the easiest path for survival.
IE: do you run after a deer to try to kill it or do you sit and wait along a deer trail for an easier kill that requires less effort?
poverty is ONLY in relation to the fiat system......
remove the man from the land and place him into a man made system of survival (fiat/jobs) and you have kingship over that man
poverty IS a man made creation called civilization and has been happening for centuries.
to be a live in maid under the roof someone else has built might be the easier path...freedom comes in many forms for folks.
remember what the church teaches....be happy that god has afforded you an opportunity to be a janitor or a doctor(sounds like the government doesn't it?) at least you have a job, at least there is welfare, at least there is social security etc etc.....
IQ has nothing to do with it.....it's called prioritizing to survive in the best possible way you can as a human....the bad part is in not knowing/seeing the difference if you don't look around.
the church, the public schools and the government have done a wonderful job in teaching humans to be happy in their station in life......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
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