…But there has always been an additional factor in the mix. Study after study has suggested that poor people are more likely than wealthy people to behave in ways that are imprudent and counterproductive. An extensive literature search shows that lower socioeconomic status is associated with a range of self-defeating behaviors, including more risk-taking (not using seat belts, for example), worse adherence to protocols (such as failing to complete a full course of a medicine) and poorer financial management (impulse buying, for example, or buying on credit, which adds considerably to an item's cost)……
….When asked to think about a minor repair, the rich and the poor performed equally well on the cognitive tests (arguing against the notion that the poor make poorer decisions because they aren't as smart). But when the repair was described as costly, performance crashed dramatically in the poor but not the rich. In other words, having to reflect on tight finances increased cognitive load for poor people.
Intrigued by those results, Mani and colleagues took their research a creative step further and studied the phenomenon of cognitive load for poor people in the real world. Seeking subjects whose income normally fluctuates radically, they decided to focus on sugar cane farmers in India. The farmers are basically paid once a year, when they sell their harvest to sugar mills, and they have to make that money last until the next harvest. The researchers measured the farmers' cognitive function before the harvest, when money was tight, and again after the harvest, when farmers had fewer money worries. Various important controls were in place, including that nutrition and the amount of physical labor were the same pre- and post-harvest. The farmers who hadn't yet harvested (and been paid for) their crops scored dramatically worse than the post-harvest farmers.
Thus, both a careful lab experiment and a superb naturalistic field study suggest that being poor brings with it cognitive challenges. Your brain has to work mighty hard if you're constantly trying to figure out how to keep your head above water, and that is likely to contribute to poor decision-making and counterproductive behavior. As if just being poor wasn't difficult enough.
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