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Written By: Admin | Updated : September 12, 2013 11:18 AM IST
Poverty hits your brain power, according to a recent international study. Poverty and the stress of making ends meet requires so much mental energy that poor have little brain power left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of the study published on Thursday. Researchers found that the mental strain of being poor could be costing people up to 13 IQ points meaning they're likelier to make mistakes and bad decisions that perpetuate their financial woes.
'Our results suggest that when you are poor, money is not the only thing in short supply. Cognitive capacity is also stretched thin,' said Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, part of an international team that conducted the study.
In a series of experiments, researchers from Harvard, Princeton and other universities in North America and from Britain's University of Warwick found that pressing financial worries had an immediate impact on poor people's ability to perform well in cognitive and logic tests. This however, doesn't mean that financially-strapped people are stupid; it's just that those living on tight budget have their effective brain power or what the researchers called 'mental bandwidth', dramatically reduced due to stress.
On average, someone weighed down by money woes showed a drop in cognitive function in one part of the study that was comparable to a 13 point dip in IQ, and similar to the performance deficit expected from someone who has missed a whole night's sleep.
'Previous views of poverty have blamed (it) on personal failings, on an environment that is not conducive to success,' said Jiaying Zhao, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. 'We are arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function,' she said.
Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton who worked on the research team, said it was not stress in general, but financial worries in particular, that led to a reduced ability to make sound decisions. 'The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems,' he said. 'But they don't have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. 'So, if you live in poverty, you're more error prone and errors cost you more dearly -- it's hard to find a way out.'
The researchers studied two very different groups - shoppers at a mall in New Jersey in the United States, and sugar cane farmers in rural India. In the mall study, they gathered dozens of low and middle-income shoppers and subjected them to a battery of tests to measure IQ and impulse control. Half of the participants were first asked to think about what they would do if their car broke down and the repair cost $1,500 - designed to kick off worries about money. It was among these people that performance dipped significantly.
In the India arm of the study, researchers found that farmers had diminished cognition before getting paid for the harvest compared to afterwards, when they have money in their pockets. 'One month after the harvest, they're pretty rich, but the month before - when the money has run out - they're pretty poor,' Mullainathan said in a report of the research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science. 'What we see is that IQ goes up, (when they are rich)... errors go way down, and response times go way down.'
He said the effect in India was about two-thirds the size of the effect in the mall study - equal to around nine or 10 IQ points difference from one month to the next.
Social scientists and economists have long argued that poverty reduces both intellectual and physical capacity. The most vocal of them is our own Amartya Sen who points out that rampant poverty across the nation prevents us from achieving our potential, despite economic growth in recent times. And it's not really hard to figure why, poverty leads in most cases to malnutrition. Without getting adequate nutrients, especially during childhood the body doesn't reach its full physical potential, it's estimated that 48% children in India are stunted and wasted due to inadequate nutrition. It seems in the same way, poverty affects people's mental health as well.
