There’s a whole lot of reasons someone can be poor: living somewhere without adequate opportunities (jobs, affordable housing), lack of affordable health care/major illness, lack of education, dumb luck, financial predators. These are all things fairly well-researched and examined. So too have researchers looked at common personality traits of the poor, the predispositions of the have-nots (though at least one study I found says not-so-much actually). A paper out today in Science takes a pretty interesting alternative view : does poverty itself create poverty, and how? The answer to the first part is unsurprisingly “yes” — being poor reinforces itself. Of course. The answer to the second part is intuitive, but also worth sharing.Here’s the theory’s core: “Having less elicits greater focus,” write Anuj K. Shah et al. That is, being poor is distracting and cognitively exhausting. That’s compelling and if you’ve ever spent an extended period without money, you’re probably well aware that not having money makes money a central part of your life. “People focus on problems where scarcity is most salient.” Which is natural, but also problematic because it distracts from future needs and opportunities. This makes poor people more likely to take actions that are risky in the long-term, like taking out 800 percent interest short-term loans from dudes behind bulletproof glass.For example, “Low-income homeowners often do not attend to regular home maintenance while they focus on more pressing expenses,” Shah et al write. “Neglected, these small repairs become major projects. Similarly, in areas where water-borne illness is common, families might focus on pressing daily expenses while failing to procure periodic water treatments … Because these [short-term] problems feel bigger and capture our attention, we engage more deeply in solving them.”This is actually a testable theory. Researchers used a series of games that looked at people’s behavior as a function of number of chances given, with chances standing in for wealth. One game was a variant of Wheel of Fortune, where “Scarcity was manipulated by budgeting participants’ chances to guess letters in word puzzles.”A simple model of effort might suggest that the rich should be more fatigued because they spent more time and made more guesses playing WoF. In our model, however, the poor would engage more deeply and could be more fatigued despite spending less time.Their model was right. The “poor” participants performed worse on cognitive tasks. Another experiment used a variation of Angry Birds that manipulated chances as an analog of wealth. The goal here was to test borrowing behavior, and, indeed, “poor” participants were more likely to make borrowing decisions that negatively impacted their overall possible outcome. “The more focused the poor were on the current round, the more they neglected (and borrowed away from) future rounds,” the researchers write.Studies like this are pretty frustrating ultimately. Answers without answers: “This paradigm can shed light on the cognitive consequences of poverty. Future research might also suggest ways to alleviate the taxing cognitive consequences of having too little.” So, cognitively overtaxed poor people of the world, help is on the way in the form of future research. In the meantime, the world will continue not cutting you a break, and the payday loan guy around the block will continue enjoying his 800 percent.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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