Poor Choices: Financial Worries Can Impair One’s Ability to Make Sound Decisions
New research suggests causative link between income level and cognitive function
By Dina Fine Maron, Scientific American
Excerpt:
Day care drop-offs and work deadlines may combine with financial woes to put a literal strain on your ability to think.
Image: Allureme
New work by a team of psychologists and economists supports the notion that humans have limited bandwidth for decision-making. And the capacity to make choices can take a hit once that cognitive load becomes too heavy. The research, based on experimental data collected on people with varying levels of self-reported income in rural India and a New Jersey shopping mall, concludes simply that at least short-term financial stress can max out our mental reserves on par with the level of impairment that results from pulling an all-nighter…
So what’s at the root of the income–brain work problem? The scientists suggest that it is a matter of “attentional capture,” meaning that poverty triggers intrusive thoughts that draw on the brain’s limited reserves. That distraction goes beyond the myriad, random thoughts that can pop up in our daily lives, says study author Eldar Shafir, a behavioral scientist at Princeton University. “If I am driving and someone is riding past on a unicycle, I get distracted, and then I’m back in a few moments,” he says. “Here it is ‘capture’—I spend an enormous amount of time on [financial concerns] and I keep coming back.” Shafir and one of his co-authors has a forthcoming book on the topic…
Read the full article: Poor Choices: Financial Worries Can Impair One’s Ability to Make Sound Decisions: Scientific American.
