Poverty even makes it tough to think properly

In public political debate there are those who want to blame the poor for their own poverty, perhaps characterizing them as lazy or lacking some other kind of character trait a person needs to earn money. Recently, celebrity cook Jamie Oliver generated controversy with a comment beginning with a disclaimer which tends to set off the alarm bells, “I’m not judgmental, but…” (uh-oh)

"I'm not judgmental, but I've spent a lot of time in poor communities, and I find it quite hard to talk about modern-day poverty. You might remember that scene in [a previous series] Ministry of Food, with the mum and the kid eating chips and cheese out of Styrofoam containers, and behind them is a massive fucking TV. It just didn't weigh up."The fascinating thing for me is that seven times out of 10, the poorest families in this country choose the most expensive way to hydrate and feed their families. The ready meals, the convenience foods." [1]

An article published in Science last week [2] described an experiment where people were asked to do a simple ‘which-shape-fits-in-the-blank’ task similar to some questions which might appear in IQ tests. They gave some good evidence that simply being poorer, having financial issues on the mind, can make it more difficult to perform on their test. It’s a nice demonstration that actually fits with the popular idea that in some way, poverty is a result of poor people’s behavior, while underscoring that a person’s behavior is affected by circumstance and being financially secure can make it easier to act smarter. Conversely, being financially vulnerable makes good decision-making harder and could potentially trap people into a cycle of poverty for which you can hardly blame them. The effect of financial vulnerability could be pretty strong; the experimenters compared the effects they found with other studies and suggested that “evoking financial concerns has a cognitive impact comparable with losing a full night of sleep”.

In an experiment with richer and poorer Americans, the experimenters asked each person a financial question first to get them thinking about money, which was “Your car is having some trouble and requires $1500 to be fixed. You can pay in full, take a loan, or take a chance and forego the service at the moment. How would you go about making this decision?” As a control, they repeated the same experiment but used $150 as the amount instead of $1500.  The experimenters say they expected that when the financial question involved $1500, the problem would be difficult for poorer participants but not for richer ones, although they expected no difference for the smaller amount (150). That’s exactly what they found – poorer people performed significantly (p<0.001) worse in the ‘fill-the-blank’ task than richer people did. They repeated the experiment without the financial question, to make sure people weren’t getting stressed out by larger numbers. Illustrating how bad performance in intellectual challenges might trap people into further poverty, the experimenters repeated the experiment, with similar results, where people were paid $0.25 per question they got right. The poorer people on average walked away from the experiment with 18% less than the richer people did, so in some way, even the experiment itself functioned to perpetuate and magnify the gap between rich and poor.

The experimenters wanted to make sure that the gap in between the rich and poor they saw didn’t just hold for the moment right after people face a tough financial decision. To do that they found that sugar cane farmers from Tamil Nadu in India struggled significantly more (p<0.001) with the ‘fill-the-blank’ tasks before harvest than after harvest, when they got paid and had fewer financial difficulties. The effect held no matter what time of year harvest occurred. Experimenters even collected heart rate and blood pressure as a way of measuring stress, and they found that even taking those factors into account, farmers still struggled more with the task before harvest. That showed that the effect they saw wasn’t fully caused by stress, at least as far as stress measured by heart rate and blood pressure is concerned. Though stress could have been a factor, the researchers thought that because an effect remained regardless of stress, the mere background cognitive demand on the farmers during hard financial times caused them to perform more poorly.

Is this even a new thing?

This study does a good job demonstrating a link between financial circumstances and cognitive ability. But it is far from the first to examine the nasty way poverty works as a catch-22 to trap people and stop them from getting ahead in the way we’d like to think people can in an egalitarian or meritocratic society. Childhood poverty seems to predict the size of people’s working memory, and mainly through chronic stress, i.e., child poverty is related to chronic stress and that chronic stress caused most of the relationship between poverty and a poor working memory as an adult [3]. IQ is even correlated worldwide with national GDPs, and when GDP rises, so do IQs, suggesting that access to money and resources helps determine IQ, not (or not only) the other way around [4].

So…?

Based on what they found, the study authors suggested that government work and income programs need to avoid adding stress and complexity to application processes for receiving income support or assistance in finding work. If beneficiaries are to be helped back into work, too much cognitive load spent thinking and worrying just about access to benefits might hinder their ability to find work. Government austerity measures which introduce new hoops beneficiaries must jump through to access government support might be intended to reduce the amount of money the government spends on income support. In the long run, the cognitive load effect observed in the study could work against such austerity measures, working to increase the amount of time it takes for people to find work and hence be dependent on government support.

More broadly, the new Science study shows that, where people in poverty are struggling to get ahead, poverty itself can prevent them from leaving poverty behind, through a harmful, though temporary, effect on intelligence. Thus, not only is it futile to blame this detrimental effect on someone’s cognitive ability on them, since it is outside of their control, the poverty effect could be relieved if only a person had relief from poverty and excessive financial concerns. Such a fact has substantial implications if we want to make our society any kind of egalitarian or meritocratic one in which the skills of every individual are fully realized for society as a whole.

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[1] Deans, J. Jamie Oliver bemoans chips, cheese and giant TVs of modern-day poverty. The Guardian, 26 August 2012. Retrieved from  http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/27/jamie-oliver-chips-cheese-modern-day-poverty on 31 August 2013.

[2] Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., & Zhao, J. (2013) Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function. Science 30 August 2013: 976-980. Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.on  on 31 August 2013.

[3] Evans, G. W. (2009) Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106(16):6545-6549. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/106/16/6545.long on 31 August 2013.

[4] Roiviainen, E. (2012) Economic, educational, and IQ gains in eastern Germany 1990-2006. Intelligence 40(6): 571-575. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289612000864 on 31 August 2013.