Poverty Reduces Brainpower: Concerns of the Poor Require More Mental Energy

Poverty may be having more of an impact on our brainpower than we thought. Scientists have discovered that the related concerns associated with poverty require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life.

In this latest study, the researchers suggest that being poor may keep a person from concentrating on avenues that might actually lift them out of poverty. In order to test this theory, the scientists conducted a series of experiments. In a New Jersey mall, roughly 400 subjects were chosen at random. Their median annual income was around $70,000 while the lowest was around $20,000. The researchers then created scenarios where the subjects had to think how to solve financial problems.

So what did the researchers find? They discovered that when the financial scenarios were easy, the rich and poor performed equally well in the cognitive tests. Yet when they were presented with hard scenarios, people at the lower end of the income scale performed significantly worse, while those at the higher end were unfazed.

That's not the only experiment they conducted, either. The researchers also tested 464 sugarcane farmers in India. Because sugarcane harvests occur once a year, these farmers find themselves rich after the harvest and poor before it; the researcher tested these farmers both before and after the harvest. In the end, it turned out that they performed better post-harvest compared to pre-harvest.

"Stress itself doesn't predict that people can't perform well-they may do better up to a point," said Eldar Shafir, one of the researchers, in a news release. "A person in poverty might be at the high part of the performance curve when it comes to a specific task and, in fact, we show that they do well on the problem at hand. But they don't have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. The poor are often highly effective at focusing and dealing with pressing problems. It's the other tasks where they perform poorly."

The findings reveal that combating poverty may require more than current services possess. More specifically, services for the poor should accommodate to the dominance that poverty has on a person's time and thinking. This could include simpler aid forms and more guidance when it comes to receiving assistance.

The findings are published in the journal Science.