Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

1. Now you might think that the hungry subjects might do worse, being tired and unfocused from their hunger. But on this particular task, they did as well as the sated subjects. Except in one case. The hungry did much better on food-related words. They were much more likely to accurately detect the word CAKE. Tasks such as these are designed to tell us what is at the top of someone’s mind. When a concept occupies our thoughts, we see words related to it more quickly. So when the hungry recognize CAKE more quickly, we see directly that food is at the top of their minds – pages 8-10
2. One study finds that when subjects are thirsty, they are much quicker (again at the level of tens of milliseconds) to recognize the word WATER. In all these cases, scarcity operates unconsciously. It captures attention whether the mind’s owner wishes it or not. – pages 8-10
3. In one study, children were asked to estimate from memory, by adjusting a physical device, the size of regular U.S. coins—from a penny to a half-dollar. The coins “looked” largest to the poorer children, who significantly overestimated the size of the coins. The most valuable coins—the quarter and half-dollar—were the most distorted. Just as food captures the focus of the hungry, the coins captured the focus of poor children. The increased focus made these coins “look” bigger. Now, it’s possible that poor children are simply unskilled at remembering size. So the researchers had the kids estimate sizes with the coins in front of them, an even simpler task. In fact, the poor children made even bigger errors with the coins in front of them. The real coins drew even more focus than did the abstract ones in memory – pages 8-10
4. Psychophysical, neurophysiological, and behavioral evidence suggests that attention changes the strength of a stimulus by increasing its salience, and thus can enhance its perceptual representation, improving or impairing various aspects of visual performance – pages 8-10
5. One study of the lonely flashed pictures of faces for one second and asked subjects to describe which emotion was being expressed. Were the faces conveying anger, fear, happiness, or sadness? This simple task measures a key social skill: the ability to understand what others are feeling. Remarkably, the lonely do better at this task. You might have thought they would do worse—after all, their loneliness might imply social ineptitude or inexperience. But this superior performance makes sense when you consider the psychology of scarcity. It is just what you would predict if the lonely focus on their own form of scarcity, on managing social contacts. They ought to be particularly attuned to reading emotions – pages 8-10
6. One study asked people to read from someone’s diary and to form an impression of the writer. Later they were asked to recall details from the diary entries. The lonely did about as well as the nonlonely. Except in one case: they were much better at – pages 8-10
7. For half the students, Kurtz framed the deadline as imminent (only so many hours left) and for the others she framed it as far off (a portion of the year left). The change in perceived scarcity changed how students managed their time. When they felt they had little time left, they tried to get more out of every day. They spent more time engaging in activities, soaking in the last of their college years. They also reported being happier— presumably enjoying more of what college had to offer – pages 22-23
8. some customers are mailed a coupon with an expiration date, while others are mailed a similar coupon that does not expire. Despite being valid for a longer period of time, the coupons with no expiration date are less likely to be used. Without the scarcity of time, the coupon does not draw focus and may even be forgotten – pages 22-23
9. organizational researchers find that salespeople work hardest in the last weeks (or days) of a sales cycle – pages 22-23
10. data-entry workers worked harder as payday got closer. – pages 22-23
11. the rich scored more points because they had more blueberries to shoot with. But looked at another way, the poor did better: they were more accurate with their shots. This was not because of some magical improvement in visual acuity. The poor took more time on each shot. (There was no limit on how long they could take.) They aimed more carefully. They had fewer shots, so they were more judicious. The rich, on the other hand, just let the blueberries fly. It is not that the rich, simply because they had more rounds, got bored and decided to spend less time on the task. Nor is it that they became fatigued. Even on the first shots they were already less focused and less careful than the poor. This matches our prediction. Having fewer blueberries, the blueberry poor enjoyed a focus dividend – page 25
12. In one study, subjects were asked to write down a personal goal, an attribute that describes a trait (e.g., “popular” or “successful”) that they would like to attain. One half were asked to list a personally important goal. The other half were asked to list just any goal. Following this, as in the milk experiment above, both groups were asked to list as many goals (important or not) as they could. Starting off with an important goal led to 30 percent fewer goals being named. – page 31
13. To measure the impact of this noise on academic performance, two researchers noted that only one side of the school faced the tracks, so the students in classrooms on that side were particularly exposed to the noise but were otherwise similar to their fellow students. They found a striking difference between the two sides of the school. Sixth graders on the train side were a full year behind their counterparts on the quieter side. Further evidence came when the city, prompted by this study, installed noise pads. The researchers found that this erased the difference: now students on both sides of the building performed at the same level. A whole host of subsequent studies have shown that noise can hurt concentration and performance. Even if the impact of noise does not surprise you, the size of the impact (a full school year level at sixth grade) should – page 42
14. Increased load in the working memory task was predicted to lower people’s ability to avoid visual distractors – page 44
15. Sometimes, just before the dot appeared, another picture would flash on the screen. For nondieters, this picture had no effect on whether people saw the dot. For dieters, in contrast, something interesting happened. They were less likely to see the red dot if they had just seen a picture of food. Flashing a picture of a cake, for example, reduced dieters’ chance of seeing the red dot immediately afterward: it was as if the cake had blinded them. This happened only with pictures of food; nonfood pictures had no effect. Of course the dieters were not physically blinded; they were just mentally distracted. Psychologists call this an attentional blink. The food picture, now gone, had made them mentally blink. When the dot appeared, their minds were elsewhere, still thinking about the food. All of this happened in a fraction of a second, too quick to control. Too quick to even be aware of. – page 44
16. The well-off subjects, with no racket, did just as well here as if they had seen the easy scenario. The poorer subjects, on the other hand, did significantly worse. A small tickle of scarcity and all of a sudden they looked significantly less intelligent. Preoccupied by scarcity, they had lower fluid intelligence scores. We have run these studies numerous times, always with the same results. This is not merely an artifact of the $3,000 being mathematically more challenging. When we ran nonfinancial problems, we found absolutely no effect of giving similarly small versus large numbers. The effect is specific to hard problems that are financial in nature (for those who are short on money). It is also not the result of a lack of motivation. In one replication of the study, we paid people for every correct answer on the Raven’s test. Presumably the lowincome participants have a greater incentive to do better: after all, the money matters to them more. But they did not do any better; in fact, they did just a tiny bit worse than before. Low-income participants who presumably could have used the extra pay left the mall with less money after having contemplated the harder scenarios, an effect that was absent for those financially more comfortable… Though this task tests executive control, quite different from fluid intelligence, the results were the same. After the financially easy questions, the poor and the well off looked similar. They were able to control their impulses to the same degree, and they made about the same number of errors. But the financially hard questions changed things dramatically for the poor. The well-off subjects continued to do just as well as if they had seen the easy scenario. They exhibited the same level of executive control. The poorer subjects, on the other hand, now did significantly worse. They were more impulsive, mistakenly hitting the same side as the flower more often. While they had hit the correct key 83 percent of the time in the context of the financially easy scenarios, correct key presses went down to 63 percent in the context of scenarios that were financially more challenging. A small tickle of scarcity and they were suddenly more impulsive. Beyond fluid intelligence, scarcity appears to reduce executive control… The postharvest farmers got about 25 percent more items correct on Raven’s. Put in IQ terms, as in the earlier mall study, this would correspond to about 9 or 10 IQ points. Not as big a gap as at the mall, but that is to be expected. After all, here we hadn’t induced them to think about money. We simply measured their mental state at an arbitrarily selected point in time, their latent tendency to have their bandwidth taxed by scarcity. On the executive control task, they were 11 percent slower in responding and made 15 percent more errors while poor, quite comparable to the mall study – page 51, 56, 58
17. civilized. As in the cake study, some subjects’ minds were loaded: they were asked to remember an eight-digit number. Those whose minds were not loaded managed to maintain composure, keeping their thoughts to themselves. Not so with the cognitively loaded subjects. They would blurt out rude comments, such as “This is bloody revolting,” despite their best intention – page 54
18. Across a variety of cognitive tests, they find that people simply perform worse when they are dieting. And when psychologists interview the respondents, they find a common pattern: concerns related to dieting are top of mind for these dieters and interfere with their performance – page 61
19. One study found that giving dieters a chocolate bar—and thereby calories—actually worsened cognitive performance. This was attributed to the fact that they were now more preoccupied with food – page 61
20. in a study looking at impulse control, when subjects who anticipated being lonely were given the opportunity to taste chocolate-chip cookies, they ate roughly twice as many – page 62
21. Consistent with this, research on the diets of older adults has found that those who feel lonely in their daily lives have a substantially higher consumption of fatty foods – page 62
22. The poor reported trade-off thinking almost twice as often as the better off (75 percent vs. 40 percent). – page 72
23. study remarkable, though, is what happened when we raised the background price. When the appliance cost $500, the percentage willing to travel barely changed; it was 73 percent. And when it rose to $1,000, the percentage willing to travel actually went up slightly, to 87 percent. The slight increase may be due to the feeling that one really must try to save when spending so much. For most people, a $35 savings looks large for the $100 DVD player (35 percent off!), but small for the $1,000 laptop (a mere 3.5 percent savings). Yet those at the Trenton soup kitchen seemed unmoved by all this; their responses barely changed – page 91
24. Nonmusicians behaved as expected. They committed errors proportionate to the length of the interval: the longer the tone, the greater the variance. They were approximating length in relative terms. In contrast, subjects who had received extensive training in music exhibited decreasing relative variability with interval length; for longer tones these musicians committed less-than-proportional errors. They appeared to be judging closer to an absolute scale – page 93
25. Studies have shown that more experienced bartenders are better at pouring and are less likely to be affected by bottle height when asked to pour a certain amount – page 93
26. Cigarette taxes, for example, come in two varieties. The excise tax shows up in the posted price, but the sales tax does not; it is added at the register. If you look at just the posted price, you will miss the sales tax. When excise taxes— the visible price—change, rich and poor smokers respond. Both smoke less. Not so for a change in the sales tax—the hidden price. Only low-income consumers respond to that. Only the low-income weigh sales and excise taxes equally (as they ought to). They not only notice prices; they are better at deciphering that the total price is more than the one posted – page 94
27. What’s the right answer here? Economists view $75 as the real cost: if you skip the game, you can sell the ticket and get $75. (This doesn’t even include the time trade-off.) Economists call this the opportunity cost—the trade-off of what else you could have spent the money on. Well-off people get this wrong. They are much more likely to say $20. Many of them would even choose a third option: $0 because the ticket is already paid for – page 103
28. The poor focused. Per second, they were more effective than the rich; they made more guesses and earned more points. This was especially true in the later rounds, as they were running out of total time: the poor made 50 percent more guesses per second and earned more per guess. Had the rich stayed as intensely focused as the poor, they could have earned many more points. Since we gave the rich more than three times as many seconds, they could have played three times as many rounds and earned three times as many points. Instead, they only earned 1.5 times as much as the poor. Further analyses confirmed that none of the reasons that might come to mind—that the rich, who played longer, were getting bored, or that the best guesses come in early in each round—could explain these results. The poor were more effective because they tunneled… So the poor resorted to borrowing often, to help themselves right now – page 114
29. the poor are worse parents. They are harsher with their kids, they are less consistent, more disconnected, and thus appear less loving. They are more likely to take out their own anger on the child; one day they will admonish the child for one thing and the next day they will admonish her for the opposite; they fail to engage with their children in substantive ways; they assist less often with the homework; they will have the kid watch television rather than read to her. We now know more about what makes for a good home environment, and poor parents are less likely to provide it. – pages 152-153
30. One study on parenting focused on air traffic controllers. What made air traffic controllers interesting is that their jobs change daily and can be intense. Some days there are many planes in the air, weather conditions are bad, and there are congestion and delays. On those days the cognitive load—tunneling for long hours on landing all planes safely—is very high. Other days are more relaxed, with not many planes in the air or on the mind. What the researchers found was that the number of planes in the air on a particular day predicted the quality of parenting that night. More planes made for worse parents. Or, if you don’t mind a more vulgar framing, think of it this way. The same air traffic controller acted “middle class” after an easy day at work and acted “poor” after a hard day’s work.- page 155
31. poor parents receive food stamps once a month, but by the end of each month they are running short. The end of the month is when their bandwidth is most taxed, the time when parenting is likely to be toughest. The economist Lisa Gennetian and her colleagues showed that these are also the times when children of parents who receive food stamps were most likely to be acting out and end up being disciplined in school. – page 157
32. smokers with financial stress are less likely to follow through on an attempt to quit -page 159
33. One study found that when low-income women were moved to higherincome neighborhoods, rates of extreme obesity and diabetes dropped tremendously; other factors may have played a role, but a reduction in stress is almost certainly part of the story. – page 159
34. thirty-eight good sleepers were instructed to go to sleep as quickly as possible. Some of them were told that after the nap they would be giving a speech. Most people really do not like to give speeches. Indeed, this group had far more trouble falling asleep and slept less well when they did – page 159
35. Other data on insomniacs show that they are more likely to be worriers. Put simply, it is hard to sleep well when you have things on your mind. – page 160
36. This is perhaps the most pernicious, long-term detrimental way in which scarcity may tax bandwidth: thoughts of scarcity erode sleep. Studies of the lonely show that they sleep less well and get fewer hours. – page 160
37. These effects are quite strong for the poor: they too have lowerquality sleep. And not sleeping enough can be – page 160
38. Studies show that sleeping four to six hours a night for two weeks leads to a decay in performance comparable to going without sleep for two nights in a row. Insufficient sleep further compromises bandwidth – page 160
39. One experiment in the United States moved thousands of families from lowincome to higher-income neighborhoods, and found modest impacts, primarily on stress and quality of life, but the underlying patterns of poverty did not change – page 180
40. Another study looked at what happened in a cardiothoracic surgery department when the number of patients per medical service worker increased. Again, there was an increase in productivity in the short run. Patients were dealt with more quickly. But this came at a cost. There was neglect. Dealing with more patients quickly lowered quality: patients were more likely to die. In fact, even the benefits did not persist. A sustained increase in workload eventually led to an increase in the time it took to manage each patient. – page 196
41. Studies have repeatedly shown that when workers sleep less they become less motivated, make more errors, and zone out more often. One clever study demonstrated this by looking at the start and end of daylight savings time, nights on which, because of the time change, people lose sleep. It found that people spent 20 percent more time cyberloafing—searching the web for unrelated content— for every hour of lost sleep on those evenings. And that is just one night of sleep. Research shows that the cumulative effects are far worse. As work hours accumulate and sleep time diminishes, productivity eventually goes down – page 197
42. So we brought savings back into the tunnel for a moment by making it top of mind. Having asked people what they were saving for and how much, we would send them, at the end of each month, a quick reminder—a text message or a letter. This benign reminder alone increased savings by 6 percent – page 207
43. One group was shown a table that listed the annual effective interest rate they would be paying (443 percent) compared to comparable loans (16 percent on a credit card). Another group was presented with similar data, but instead of interest rates, they were shown how many dollars they would pay on the loan if they were to repay in two weeks ($45), one month ($90), and so on, as compared to how many dollars they would pay if the same amount were borrowed on a credit card ($2.50 for two weeks, $5 for a month, and so forth). In other words, similar data were presented in slightly different ways: In one case, interest rate, an abstract measure of something, the precise implications of which may be hard to gauge. In the other, dollars paid, familiar units that you need to take out of your pocket. What Bertrand and Morse found was that far fewer customers took the payday loan when they were shown the cost in dollars – 216
44. To bridge the gap between when there’s money and when fertilizer is needed, some researchers created a simple and clever intervention. They had the farmers prepurchase the fertilizer, buying it during harvest, when they were flush with cash, for delivery at planting time. With this simple change, the percentage of Kenyan farmers who bought and used fertilizer rose to 45 percent from 29 percent—a dramatic increase. Failure was averted by relocating an important decision from a time when the farmers were cash-poor and, more important, bandwidth-poor to a time when they were cash-rich and bandwidth-rich – page 219
45. For the first group, they simply observed the tendency to apply. For the second, they tried to bridge the information gap. Perhaps eligible high school graduates didn’t know about the money they were eligible for, so the tax professionals told them. For the third group, the researchers did something inspired. Tax professionals not only told the eligible graduates what they were eligible for, but they also actually filled out the forms with them. Simply telling people the exact benefits they were eligible for had no noticeable effect. But the help filling out the forms did have a remarkable effect: not only were they more likely to apply for financial aid, they were also 29 percent more likely to enroll in college – page 221

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