A plea against sensationalized reports of scientific studies on the poor.
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By Labanya Mookerjee
PHILADELPHIA: Friday morning, I watched my Twitter timeline explode into moralizing chaos in reaction to a distorted, but widely distributed article that explains a recent study on how “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Ability.”
The study itself, published in Science, asks policy-makers to “beware of imposing cognitive taxes on the poor,” such as “filling out long forms, preparing for a lengthy interview,” all of which evidently interrupt cognitive abilities.
It’s not the actual study, really, that I have beef with; it’s the subsequent “news” articles that trouble me. These articles haphazardly summarize the study, using it to support cultural assumptions on the poor that help to sustain existing social structures.
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And, it baffles me that these articles are very articulate in stating the problem; however, they completely neglect to report the solutions offered by authors of the scientific document, which makes me seriously question why exactly this study takes the spotlight right now.
After all, if the study has come of interest because of the ongoing discussions on unemployment, minimum wage, or even student loans, why have not these stressors been addressed within the articles?
Also, why the use of atrocious rhetoric, on the part of the media, to promote the study?
“Picture yourself after an all-nighter. Being poor is like that every day,” The Washington Post tweeted with the link to the article on the relation between poverty and cognitive ability. Thank you, Washington Post, for nearly equating poverty with one sleepless night.
I should mention that the actual study doesn’t draw such an explicit conclusion, but rather only suggests that “evoking financial concerns has a cognitive impact comparable with losing a full night of sleep.”
Huffington Post Impact, on the other hand, tweeted a short 34 characters (“Study: Poverty reduces brain power”), while even PBS’s NOVA blurted out, “Poverty puts a crutch in your mental capacities.” Ouch.
Again, the scientific document makes no mention of lowered intelligence; it simply argues that cognitive abilities are strained under stress.
However, news agencies sensationalize the findings, as they often do with scientific studies, which unnerve me to a frustrating extent. I’m too tired for eloquence, so I’ll get right to it; here are my reasons:
- The treatment of “the poor” as though they are specimens that need to be defined by genus, species, habitat, rather than as hardworking human beings with, you know, souls, responsibility, families, aspirations, etc.;
- The disabling way that society promotes such scientific findings, using catchy phrases that unfairly rob all agency from low-income individuals, reducing them to the victim-state;
- The oversimplification of science into laymen’s terms, which finally screams to everyone that being poor = lower intelligence
Side note: This is where moralizers start preaching about how the poor, saddled with extra loads of anxiety emerging from poverty, have disrupted cognitive abilities, and therefore, we must take action to fix this. While this is a noble gesture that I fully support on a political platform, the condescending attitude trailing close behind the logic is insulting. - The use of “science” to reinforce already culturally-held stereotypes of “the poor” to further political agendas and existing social structures.
- Finally, do we really lack that much compassion and are we really that alienated from the working class that we need a scientific study to understand that low-income individuals are exhausted and too much on their mind to dwell on the same issues that we dwell on?
Aside: Dear middle-class, college-educated public that this article is clearly addressed to: wasn’t this conclusion already proposed seventy years ago with Abraham Maslow’s theory of the “Hierarchy of Needs”? Was this information not hammered into us in all our basic Psych 101 courses?
So, as a lit major, the method of using graphs and statistics to understand the adverse circumstances that low-income individuals face is a sad indicator of how small-hearted we have become as a society.
However, as a student interested in research, I also appreciate that scholars have devoted time and money to provide an empirical study that can be used to initiate policy-reform that can improve the lifestyles of the working class.
And, if oversimplifying conclusions is necessary to publicize scholarly articles and if articles will be distributed with the intention of promoting ulterior political motives that affirm currently-held ideologies, why not take it a step further and outright use the study to promote the fight for raising the minimum wage?
Meanwhile, ironically, on the very day that news of this study was making its rounds, stories of young, Sushma Verma of Lucknow, teen prodigy and daughter of a wage laborer making her way to a Master’s in Microbiology, went viral in the Times of India and other Indian news organizations.
While, yes, she is an exception to most who come from such trying socioeconomic backgrounds, her remarkable talent also collapses debilitating generalizations made about those who even slightly deviate from the middle-class, educated norm.
There is no single way to define “what it feels like to be poor.”
(Labanya Mookerjee has received the Tim Marks scholarship for the Arts, the Academic Excellence Award and the 2013 Francis J. Ryan award for “Best Undergraduate Research Paper” at Eastern American Studies Association Conference.)