New study finds rich people have less to worry about.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A new study finds that people living in poverty typically have lower IQs than those with higher incomes.
The study – which was undertaken by researchers at some of the best institutions in the US and UK, such as Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick – asserts that the constant mental stress of living from paycheck to paycheck and looking for more ways to make money compound stress levels to the point where those living in poverty end up straining their brain power and not having a whole lot left. They end up making bad decisions.
The study was conducted on two separate research groups: patrons of a mall in New Jersey, and sugarcane farmers in a poor, rural area of India. The ultimate finding was that rich people, because they have so much money, have less to worry about and therefore the likelihood of them committing an error or mistake plummets. The inverse is true of those in living in poverty. The farmers made better decisions in life post-harvest when they had money, compared to pre-harvest, when they were struggling financially. The farmers’ IQ levels increased by 25 percent when they had more money.
The study found that some 400 shoppers at a mall in New Jersey, who participated in the study, reacted differently when they had to deal with stressful financial issues, like an expensive car repair bill. The IQ scores of poorer people were 40 percent lower.
Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard University and a research member of the study, explained that a person’s cognitive capacity is “stretched thin” by incessant worrying about money, but was careful to stress that people living in poverty are by no means inherently stupid. Rather, all humans have a certain “mental bandwidth”, as the researchers called it, which gets stretched past a certain point by those with lower incomes, thus decreasing the functionality of their brains.
Ultimately, he said, “it’s about struggling to make ends meet.”
Princeton psychology professor Eldar Shafir added to that, saying that low-income people are often highly adept at solving problems, but expend so much brain power in doing so that they don’t have any left, thus making them more prone to errors and committing mistakes, often times costly ones.
“Financial constraints capture a lot of your attention,” said Shafir, saying the report’s findings essentially mean that poor people are so focused on one thing that their minds are sometimes unable to focus on the dozens of other things going on around them.
T contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com