Research conducted over the last two decades lends powerful credence to the claim that chronic poverty cripples an individual’s ability to make sound financial choices, with each decision exacting a “psychic cost” that diminishes the mental fortitude needed to make subsequent tough choices.
As Jamie Holmes, writing in The New Republic, says, the research results—which are likely not to be as revelatory to the psychological community as they are to the general public—demand a radical rethinking of official U.S. social policy governing the kind of assistance we offer to the poor. —ARK
The New Republic:
In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”
Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”
... Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”
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By TonyG, June 25, 2011 at 6:01 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
IceNine - “Secondly, we refuse to make the minimum wage an actual living wage.”
Then, don’t try to “live” off of minimum wage. Advertise…scream from the rooftops, that a minimum wage income is insufficient to support any sort of reasonable existence. If anyone thinks minimum wage is meant to provide/support any sort of reasonable (materialistic) existence then welcome to your new reality. Educate yourself, plan, create your existence both present and future. But do these things from a base of knowledge that realizes that “minimum wage” will do nothing more than give you some spending money for the weekend….if dad will give you the keys.
Report thisI started to say that no one is “owed” any particular “minimum” level of existence….I don’t know if I can say that. Perhaps a basic human right IS some guaranteed level of “minimum existence” provided by a “minimum wage”. But who decides what this minimum level is? By most of the worlds standards….the poorest over here (the US), have it pretty damn good.
Let’s fix ourselves first. Reduce poverty (by our standards) over here. Don’t remove the crutch of “minimum wage”....point out that it NEVER really was a crutch in the first place and instill the sense of responsibility for one’s own reality. Then, then….we can begin to help address things outside of our borders.
By Lew Ciefer, June 13, 2011 at 6:09 pm Link to this comment
@ By prisnersdilema, June 13 at 6:52 am
This report and article was written by someone who has never been poor so they don’t
really understand. Poverty is pain. The endless pain of hunger, the ache of the cold…
What you have described is not poverty but destitution. Subtle difference but different all the same.
Obese poor is somewhat of a dichotomy, isn’t it? Poor and poverty are subjective and are not a one size fits all.
There’s far too much thinking with the heart and it is a major factor in the plight of the poor. What’s lacking and sorely needed today is clear-headed thinking and education, especially in the Ivory towers of protective isolation occupied by the Ruling Elite and their boot-lickers in Academia and the Media.
Report thisBy anaman51, June 13, 2011 at 4:47 pm Link to this comment
Being poor eats away at a person’s ability to see themsevles as anything but a consummate failure. Day after day, year after year, you get numb to the fact that your not getting enough nutrition. Being hungry becomes the norm. You realize you can’t remember ever having a nice day. Upon awakening, you know the day will suck, like all the days you spend with no hope of ever getting out of that hole. There’s no visible end to it. I know I will die sick and alone, and that no one cares enough anymore to change that. My life is sub-par, but there’s no alternative. There never will be. Depression sets in, along with a pressing need for the end of the suffering. This is the legacy of poverty, and it’s getting worse by the day. Soon, it will be all but illegal to be poor, if the conservatives have their way.
Report thisBy gerard, June 13, 2011 at 11:25 am Link to this comment
John R: “Crime is the friend of the poor.”
“Friend???” Crime gets the poor into a prison. But crime gets the rich a bailout.
Report thisBy John R., June 13, 2011 at 9:58 am Link to this comment
Crime is the friend of the poor.
When enough is enough, and there are no jobs to earn an income, when there is no job to create income from, and there is no longer any unemployment insurance to be received; the poor will become desperate.
And crime becomes the only choice.
The targets will be those with no protection first.
As the criminal gains experience, the targets will be the wealthy.
Take away a humans’ ability to earn an honest income and the human will resort to a dishonest income.
And it’s quite inhumane how Wall Street, and the Banking industry have written in they’re dishonesty into they’re policies; bilking money legally from the human.
The attorneys writing these contracts should face they’re own souls (if any) and make a spiritual attempt at reconciliation.
Report thisBy prisnersdilema, June 13, 2011 at 6:52 am Link to this comment
This report and article was written by someone who has never been poor so they don’t
Report thisreally understand. Poverty is pain. The endless pain of hunger, the ache of the cold, the
hurt of cold bones sleeping on pavement, of untreated broken teeth that make chewing
impossible, of cancer eating you up, while you sacrifice what little you have to your
children so they won’t have to carry a load of pain into their lives. In a country where just
about 68% of the people are obese. But that’s just the problem there is too much
thinking with your head, and too little thinking with your heart. The poor are guilty of
being poor, the rich innocent because they are rich. But the poor have dignity because of
the suffering they silently bear, the rich have none. And so they try and steel it by empty
intellectualisms of compassion.
By Salome, June 13, 2011 at 6:43 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Shouldn’t the Dept. of Defense be more truthfully named the Dept. of Aggression?
Report thisBy Night-Gaunt, June 12, 2011 at 8:27 pm Link to this comment
Poor and little food, much less mental stimulation and terrible conditions produce this. In the realm of euthenics if the environment is bad then you don’t stand much of a chance to make it out of there.
Report thisBy IceNine, June 12, 2011 at 2:27 pm Link to this comment
kerryrose - I’m with you here. I, too, can attest to the exhausting nature of poverty. And the unmitigated stress. Both of which intensify if you are working hard just to sustain your level of poverty. The working poor in America are worked half to death for pennies above nothing. I know minimum wage was raised again a year or so ago - can’t remember exactly when. But as a young minimum wage worker I can remember getting excited about that the first time Congress passed an increase in the minimum wage - until I realized they were going to phase in the buck or so increase over a period of years, 25 cents at a time. By the time we were up to that whole buck, the cost of living poor had risen also and completely wiped out the gain.
TDoff - “So long as we employ, and presumably pay, ‘social psychologists’, to sit around and conduct experiments such as how long, and how well, folks can resist eating chocolate when tempting radishes are their alternate choice, how can the US have an unemployment, or for that matter, a poverty, ‘problem’?”
I’ve seen money wasted on studies that offered far less hope for increased knowledge of any subject at all. Never fails to amaze me. But in reality, we do have unemployment and poverty problems because: Firstly, we don’t make much of anything in this country anymore - except war. We outsource everything, complaining all the while about undocumented workers stealing American jobs. Our educational system is falling apart, all the better for US companies to justify hiring more cheaply from abroad for any math/science/IT related jobs. And from the view of the US soldier, even our wars are to some extent outsourced, with the military contracting out significant chunks of support functions to private companies.
Secondly, we refuse to make the minimum wage an actual living wage. The notion of resisting a choice to splurge on some indulgent food item is really laughable if you are playing musical chairs with your monthly bills and just hoping to god you can keep enough going to keep on keeping on - to survive yet another round of musical chairs. As a country, I guess, we cannot choose to pay an honest day’s wage in return for an honest day’s labor. We are too mentally depleted to make that choice after having been forced to choose between donkeys or elephants to run the national circus. So contemplating being forced to pay the true cost of goods and services is just too damned much for us. We do not like radishes at all.
gerard: Seems like the whole freakin world runs on the scarcity model, eh? And now we can add the willpower of poor people to the list of things that are in scarce supply. The one thing that does seem to exist in abundance is the insanity of unbridled greed. There are people - not in my immediate vicinity, but out there somewhere - who have so much that they couldn’t get it spent in one lifetime if they tried. I’m willing to bet most of them didn’t start out as motel/hotel workers, agricultural workers, fast food workers, etc. Most of them didn’t use their bootstraps to get where they are.
The article overall seems to be sympathetic to the difficulties of living in poverty, in spite of a sort of twisted let’s see how the other half lives approach. But it also talks about poverty in terms of developing nations almost exclusively:
“The developed world offers numerous such “commitment products”: certificates of deposit, pension plans, government savings bonds, and education savings accounts, to name a few.”
I don’t know, have never known, any poor Americans who could take advantage of CD’s, pension plans, savings bonds, etc, etc. You can’t buy certificates of deposit while your electricity or gas or water is being shut off. You can’t buy CD’s and then tell your kids there’s nothing for dinner because you’re saving for the future. These things just don’t fly among poor Americans, any more than they do among the poor in other parts of the world.
Report thisBy mary, June 12, 2011 at 12:56 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Great points, Gerard!
I also find the conclusions drawn about the limited nature of willpower as it
relates to being able to “get out of” poverty very problematic.
For one, it does not address the psychological cost of being told (through sales
& marketing) that you are “less than” if you don’t own/buy/acquire all of this
stuff. And how about the psychological cost of social darwinism (i.e. the
assertion that those who are poor were born to be that way: stupid, lazy, etc.).
Aside from victim-blaming, there is also an assumption that “getting out of
poverty is a possibility for everyone who wants it. Right, it’s just that easy—pull
yourself up by the bootstraps nonsense! Don’t pay any mind to the fact that
resources and money are scarce and are becoming more and more scarce as
the rich get richer throughout the world. How can you pick as many roses as
you need when the field has already been picked clean?
Think again people. Better yet, go ask a poor person why they’re poor. They’ll
Report thisgive you a better answer than a privileged psychologist.
By kerryrose, June 12, 2011 at 12:29 pm Link to this comment
I can attest that being poor is exhausting.
Report thisBy TDoff, June 12, 2011 at 12:04 pm Link to this comment
So long as we employ, and presumably pay, ‘social psychologists’, to sit around and conduct experiments such as how long, and how well, folks can resist eating chocolate when tempting radishes are their alternate choice, how can the US have an unemployment, or for that matter, a poverty, ‘problem’?
Why don’t we just collect all the currently unemployed, en masse, and designate some of them ‘Experimenters’ (or ‘Social Psychologists’), and the rest ‘Experimentees’ (or ‘Typical Dummies’), put them all on a payroll, and let the games begin?
The SP’s can find out whether the TD’s prefer screwing skinnies or fatties, of the same or opposite sexes, and do they like using condoms; if they’d rather munch on a Big Mac or filet mignon, and how soon after do they belch; do they prefer sipping bagged Muscatel or Cristal, and how many bottles does it take to make them puke?
They could look forward to a lifetime of these well-paid endeavors, followed by handsome retirement plans. Not only would this solve the US’s current unemployment and poverty problems, but it would give our young folk an alternative to joining our Department of ‘Defense’ military, and getting their a**es and testicles shot off in the next ‘god’-forsaken snake-pit we decide to ‘Shock and Awe’, invade, and ‘Build into a Nation’.
Report thisBy gerard, June 12, 2011 at 11:40 am Link to this comment
The rich take another look at the poor to find out what’s wrong with them!
“All of this suggests that we need to rethink our approaches to poverty reduction. Many of our current anti-poverty efforts focus on access to health, educational, agricultural, and financial services. Now, it seems, we need to start treating willpower as a scarce and important resource as well.” (Quote-Unquote)
Oh, yeah. It’s their fault. They lack will power, which is not only the result of being poor, but the cause. It’s not the fault of the capitalist system which rewards thievery and punishes the inability or lack of opportunity to steal. And on top of that, to scorn those who do not steal.
Get this: Poverty is a mental disease that poor people “catch”. Not my fault. Not your fault. We are healthier because we have more “will power,” and are therefore able to “catch” enough money. Thus we don’t “catch” poverty, which comes from weak will-power. It’s a mental problem, not an economic problem. They should all see a psychologist.
What a crock!
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