Study finds poverty reduces brainpower

D o erty and the all consuming fretting that comes with it re uire so much mental en ergy that the poor ha e little brain power left to de ote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study published on hursday.

he mental strain could be costing poor people up to intelligence uotient points and means they are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that amplify and perpetuate their financial woes, researchers found.

ur results suggest that when you are poor, money is not the only thing in short supply. ogniti e ca pacity is also stretched thin,” said ar ard economist Sendhil ul lainathan, part of an international team that conducted the study.

n a series of experiments, researchers from ar ard, rinc eton and other uni ersities in orth merica and from ritain s ni ersity of Warwick found that pressing financial worries had an immediate impact on poor people s ability to perform well in cogniti e and logic tests.

ar from signaling that poor people are stupid, the results sug gest those li ing on a tight budget ha e their effecti e brain power, or what the researchers called mental bandwidth”, dramatically limited by the stress of making ends meet.

n a erage, someone weighed down by money woes showed a drop in cogniti e function in one part of the study that was compa rable to a point dip in , and similar to the performance deficit expected from someone who has missed a whole night s sleep.

re ious iews of po erty ha e blamed it on personal fail ings, on an en ironment that is not conduci e to success,” said iaying hao, an assistant professor of psychology at the ni ersity of ritish olumbia in anada.

We are arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cogniti e function,” she said.

ldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at rinceton who worked on the re search team, said it was not stress in general, but financial worries in particular, that led to a reduced ability to make sound decisions.

he poor are often highly ef fecti e at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems,” he said. ut they don t ha e lefto er bandwidth to de ote to other tasks.

So, if you li e in po erty, you re more error prone and errors cost you more dearly it s hard to find a way out.”

he researchers studied two ery different groups shop pers at a mall in ew ersey in the nited States, and sugar cane farmers in rural ndia.

n the mall study, they gathered do ens of low and middle income shoppers and sub ected them to a battery of tests to measure and impulse control.

alf of the participants were first asked to think about what they would do if their car broke down and the repair cost , designed to kick off worries about money. t was among these people that performance dipped significantly.

n ndia, the researchers found that farmers had diminished cog niti e performance before getting paid for their har est compared to afterwards, when their coffers ha e been replenished.

ne month after the har est, they re pretty rich, but the month before when the money has run out they re pretty poor,” ul lainathan said in a report of the research, which was published on hursday in the ournal Sci ence.

What we see is that goes up, when they are rich ... errors go way down, and response times go way down.”

e said the effect in ndia was about two thirds the si e of the effect in the mall study e ual to around nine or points differ ence from one month to the next.