Liberals tend to blame poverty on economic and political systems rigged to benefit the well-off. Conservatives tend to blame poverty on the disorganized lives of the poor themselves. New research on the brain published last month in the journal Science concurs that poor people often make poor decisions about their lives — but they do so because they're poor.
The human brain has only so much bandwidth, the study explains. That's why talking on your cellphone while driving is such a bad idea. It's why air traffic controllers preoccupied with preventing a midair collision neglect other flights. In a similar fashion, poverty imposes a heavy cumulative load on the poor, so heavy that there's too little brainpower left over to do the things that might raise their circumstances.
"It appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity," the authors contend. "This is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks." The study concludes that poverty's mental impact is akin to a loss of 13 IQ points, or about the difference between a normally functioning adult and a chronic alcoholic.
If correct, these results offer valuable insights into the debilitating nature of poverty, and might help explain its stubborn persistence. Perhaps it's not as easy to pull yourself up by your bootstraps as some people imagine, even in a society that offers considerable help.
The study, led by a team that included Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir, employed two experiments. In the first, rich and poor shoppers at a New Jersey mall were presented an easy and a hard financial problem.
In the first scenario, shoppers were told that their cars needed repairs of $150. In the second, the repair bill was $1,500. After considering various complex options for paying those bills, the shoppers were given intelligence tests. Following the easy scenario, the rich and poor shoppers performed about equally well. But after the second scenario, with its larger financial stakes, the poor performed far worse, making the rich appear to be suddenly smarter.
A second experiment involved sugar cane farmers in India who tend to be poor before harvest and comparatively wealthy afterward. Farmers performed far worse on intelligence tests given before harvest, when they were poor, than after harvest, when they had money.
What the researchers uncovered wasn't stress in a clinical sense, but the inability to clear mental space to cope with matters other than scarcity, they said. The results were especially troubling, they said, because a narrower cognitive bandwidth is likely to exacerbate tendencies that the poor already exhibit, including less use of preventive health care, careless work habits and less-attentive parenting. The authors emphasized that they were not blaming the poor, but merely describing the effects that poverty imposes.
