Effective Stupidity

Thursday, September 12, 2013

I've seen an interesting kind of analysis pop up in a couple of different places. I'd call it "effective stupidity". The idea is that certain situations can cause people to allocate part of their finite amount of attention on distractions, rather than on solving bigger problems. One such situation is poverty. "Urban Wonk" Emily Badger explains this at the Atlantic:

This understanding of the brain's bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty - like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time. [links in original]
In one experiment, researchers found that priming people to think about financial problems was the functional equivalent of losing a night's sleep -- or 13 IQ points.

Blogger Chris Yeh cites other work that generalizes this: 
[S]hortages lead people to make poor decisions. That's because the brain can only process so much.
I wouldn't say that all shortages do this, or phrase the effect quite so deterministically, but I think it's a good point. Yeh also notes that what I am calling "effective stupidity" pops up among middle-class professionals who do not set scheduling priorities well, and suffer what amounts to a time shortage as a result.

It is interesting to consider how a problem like poverty or overscheduling can mushroom well beyond having too little money or feeling like one has too little time.

-- CAV

2 comments:

Steve D said...

'First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants.'


I don’t think this study proves what they think it does. Although it does suggest that the poor are more primed to have their cognitive performance reduced by thinking about finances, it certainly does not indicate cause or effect nor prove that poverty causes reduced cognitive performance. Rather, it is more likely that both poverty and reduced exam performance (after thinking about money) are the effect of something else - poor thinking habits across the board. (Sorry about the awkward phrasing – but this is a complex concept to get across simply).

Go to a long boring seminar on finances and then take an algebra test. Is it really surprising that people who are more negatively affected by the seminar end up both being poorer and doing worse on the exam? Perhaps finances simply bore them and put them in a bad mindset making it more difficult for them to work out the right answers. And that people who are interested in finances might be less wealthy makes sense as well.

The problem with all of these types of studies is they assume that if B comes after A, and B is correlated or linked to A then B is caused by A. But a C event causing both A and B but at different times will lead to exactly the same data pattern.

Gus Van Horn said...

"he problem with all of these types of studies is they assume that if B comes after A, and B is correlated or linked to A then B is caused by A. But a C event causing both A and B but at different times will lead to exactly the same data pattern."

Excellent point.