Study finds cash shortages slow the brain
Print Edition
Being short on cash may make you a bit slower in the brain, a new study suggests.
People worrying about having enough money to pay their bills tend to lose temporarily the equivalent of 13 IQ points, scientists found when they gave tests to shoppers at a New Jersey mall and farmers in India.
The idea is that financial stress monopolizes thinking, making other calculations slower and more difficult — a bit like going without sleep for a night, say the economists and psychologists who wrote the study published in yesterday’s issue of the journal “Science.”
“Our paper isn’t about poverty. It’s about people struggling to make ends meet,” said Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard economist and study co-author.
“When we think about people who are financially stressed, we think they are short on money, but the truth is they are also short on cognitive capacity.”
If you are always thinking about overdue bills, a mortgage or rent, or college loans, it takes away from your focus on other things, Mullainathan said.
The study used tests that studied various aspects of thinking including a traditional IQ test, getting the 13-IQ-point drop, said study co-author Jiaying Zhao, a professor of psychology and sustainability at the University of British Columbia.
In controlled conditions, they had about 400 shoppers at Quaker Bridge Mall in central New Jersey consider certain financial scenarios.
Then they looked at real life in the fields of India, where farmers only get paid once a year. Before the harvest, they take out loans and pawn goods. After they sell their harvest, they are flush with cash.
Mullainathan and colleagues tested the same 464 farmers before and after the harvest, and their IQ scores improved by 25 percent when their wallets fattened.
“It’s a very powerful effect,” said co-author Eldar Shafir, a Princeton University psychology professor. “When you are dealing with budgetary finances, it does intrude on your thinking. It’s at the top of your mind.”
In the New Jersey study, scientists presented shoppers with scenarios that involved a large and a small car repair bill.
Those with family incomes of about US$20,000 scored about the same as those with US$70,000 incomes on IQ tests when the car bill was small. But when the poorer people had to think about a high repair bill, their IQ scores were 40 percent lower.
Education differences can’t be a major factor as the poor only scored worse when they were faced with big bills, Shafir said.
The study authors say their results contradict conservative economic, social and political theory that says it is individuals — not circumstances — that are the primary problem with poverty.
“For a long time we’ve been blaming the poor for their own failings,” Zhao said. “We’re arguing something very different.”
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