Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (28 page)

23   
as payday got closer
:
S. Kaur, M. Kremer, and S. Mullainathan, “Self-Control and the Development of Work Arrangements,”
American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings
(2010).

23   
“An Englishman’s mind works best”
:
M. Hastings,
Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord, 1940–45
(London: HarperPress, 2009).

24   
a video game based on Angry Birds
:
Here we describe a set of studies briefly. Details of these, including sample sizes and more careful statistical tests, can be found in Shah, Mullainathan, and Shafir, “Some Consequences of Having Too Little,”
Science
338, no. 6107 (November 2012): 682–85.

26   
the blueberry rich did not earn anywhere near twice as much
:
It is also not the case that the blueberry rich simply got bored or did not want to spend as much time with the task. If that were the case, they could have played fewer rounds overall and stopped early.

27   
Just as we cannot effectively tickle ourselves
:
Evidence on self-tickling ranges from experiments where self-tickling happens through control of an independent object to fMRI data. A wonderful review is in Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Daniel Wolpert, and Chris Frith, “Why Can’t You Tickle Yourself?”
Neuroreport
11, no. 11 (2000): R11–R16. The prevailing view is that self-produced movement can be predicted and its effects can be attenuated. We know of no such careful empirical work on imagined deadlines or time pressure. The renegotiation problem is often discussed. An imagined deadline does not feel pressing because in the back of one’s mind is the knowledge that you can always renegotiate it with yourself.

27   
At 10 p.m. on April 23, 2005
:
State Fire Marshal’s Office Firefighter Fatality Investigation
, no. 05-307-04, Texas Department of Insurance, Austin, Texas. We thank Jessica Gross for helpful research on this case, and Dr. Burton Clark for helpful correspondence.

28   
vehicle accidents as the second leading cause of firefighter deaths
:
P. R. LeBlanc and R. F. Fahy,
Full Report: Firefighter Fatalities in the United States—2004
(Quincy, Mass.: National Fire Protection Association, 2005).

28   
between 20 and 25 percent of firefighter fatalities
:
Firefighter fatality retrospective study, April 2002. (Prepared for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, United States Fire Service, National Fire Data Center, by TriData Corporation, Arlington, Virginia).

28   
had graduated from a safety class the year before
:
C. Lumry (January 21, 2010).
Amarillo Firefighter Fatality—COFT | Council On Firefighter Training.
Retrieved from
http://www.coft-oklahoma.org/news-updates/m.blog/21/amarillo-firefighter-fatality
.

28   
“I don’t know of a firefighter”
:
C. Dickinson,
Chief’s Corner
(February 27, 2007), retrieved from
http://www.saratogacofire.com/seatbelt.htm
.

29   
the narrowing of the visual field
:
L. J. Williams, “Tunnel Vision Induced by a Foveal Load Manipulation,”
Human Factors
27, no. 2 (1985): 221–27. By
tunneling
vision, researchers refer to something quite concrete that they have studied for years, sometimes at the level of the actual eye. People are made to focus on a target that’s in front of the fovea, the center of the eye’s retina. Then, items are presented at the parafoveal level, surrounding the fovea, where visual acuity is lower. And they measure people’s ability to detect those items at the periphery while they perform various tasks at the center. And what they find is quite remarkable. They keep all the visual information intact and slightly alter people’s task. For example, all subjects see the same
A
, and some have to decide whether it’s the letter
A
(easy) whereas others have to decide whether it’s a vowel (harder). And what they find is that although the visual experience is identical, those who have to think harder about the foveal
A
are less good at detecting items at the periphery. As they focus more on the task, they tunnel and lose peripheral vision. While this is at the level of the physical eye,
tunneling
also refers to the cognitive equivalent of this visual experience. It is a single-mindedness that misses much of what’s peripheral.

29   
“To photograph is to frame”
:
Susan Sontag,
Regarding the Pain of Others
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 46.

31   
not
to give you “milk” and “snow”
:
N. J. Slamecka, “The Question of Associative Growth in the Learning of Categorized Material,”
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
11, no. 3 (1972): 324–32. Another study asked people to name states in the United States and found that “helping” them by giving them some state names only decreased the total number recalled. See Raymond Nickerson, “Retrieval Inhibition from Part-Set Cuing: A Persisting Enigma in Memory Research,”
Memory and Cognition
12, no. 6 (November 1984): 531–52.

31   
subjects were asked to write down a personal goal
:
J. Y. Shah, R.
Friedman, and A. W. Kruglanski, “Forgetting All Else: On the Antecedents and Consequences of Goal Shielding,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
83, no. 6 (2002): 1261.

31   
Psychologists call this
goal inhibition
:
C. M. MacLeod, “The Concept of Inhibition in Cognition,” in
Inhibition in Cognition
, ed. David S. Gorfein and Colin M. Macleod (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2007), 3–23.

34   
Subjects had to retrieve from memory
:
The illustration here shows only a few items in shades of gray. The actual experiment differed from this in two ways. First, subjects faced many more items. Second, the items were in different colors and these colors also had to be recalled.

34   
They earned less even though they had more total guesses
:
These results are from an unpublished experiment. Subjects earned 7 percent less when given one and three guesses than when given one guess in both cases (N = 33, p < .05).

35   
I took a speed-reading course
:
Woody Allen—Biography, IMDb,
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000095/bio
.

35   
So you want to save an extra $10,000
:
B. Arends, “How to Save $10,000 by Next Thanksgiving,”
Wall Street Journal
, November 20, 2011. Retrieved from
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204323904577 040101565437734.html
.

36   
from health insurance to crop insurance
:
A brief discussion and a list of examples can be found in Michael J. McCord, Barbara Magnoni, and Emily Zimmerman, “A Microinsurance Puzzle: How Do Demand Factors Link to Client Value?”
MILK Brief
, no. 7. Available at
http://www.microinsurancecentre.org/milk-project/milk-docs/doc_details/835-milk-brief-7-a-microinsurance-puzzle-how-do-demand-factors-link-to-client-value.html
.

36   
more than 90 percent of farmers
:
X. Giné, R. Townsend, and J. Vickery, “Patterns of Rainfall Insurance Participation in Rural India,”
The World Bank Economic Review
22, no. 3 (2008): 539–66.

36   
The same is true of health insurance
:
A. Aizer, “Low Take-Up in Medicaid: Does Outreach Matter and for Whom?”
The American Economic Review
93, no. 2 (2003): 238–41.

36   
worse than driving at above legal alcohol levels
:
D. L. Strayer, F. A. Drews, and D. J. Crouch, “A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver,”
Human Factors
48, no. 2 (2006): 381–91. Also, D. Redelmeier and R. Tibshirani, “Association Between
Cellular-Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions,”
New England Journal of Medicine
336, no. 7 (1997), 453–58. Note also that a recent large-scale naturalistic study surprisingly found little effect of cell phone use on crash probabilities. See Saurabh Bhargava and Vikram Pathania, “Driving Under the (Cellular) Influence” (2008), available at SSRN 1129978. This latter study, which avoids some of the problems that typically plague field-based studies of driving risk, is intriguing, yet it contradicts a large body of other data and will need to await follow-up investigation.

36   
eating while driving can be as big a danger
:
There are no experiments we know of on eating while driving. The best data we have are from the “100-car study” in which one hundred cars were fitted with monitoring devices and tracked for twelve to thirteen months, resulting in 43,000 hours and over two million vehicle miles worth of data. They found that eating while driving increased the odds of a crash or near crash by 57 percent. Talking on a cell phone increased the risk by 29 percent. Dialing the cell phone, however, increases the risk by 279 percent, illustrating a key finding of the study that visual distraction is still extremely deadly. See Sheila G. Klauer et al., “The Impact of Driver Inattention on Near-Crash/Crash Risk: An Analysis Using the 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study Data,” no. HS-810 594 (2006).

36   
41 percent of Americans
:
See Paul Taylor and C. Funk, “Americans and Their Cars: Is the Romance on the Skids?” (2006), available on the Pew Research Center website.

36   
people consume more calories when they are distracted
:
B. Boon, W. Stroebe, H. Schut, and R. Ijntema, “Ironic Processes in the Eating Behaviour of Restrained Eaters,”
British Journal of Health Psychology
7, no. 1 (2002): 1–10.

37   
In lean times, many small businesses
:
“Recession-Proof Your Business,”
About.com
Small Business: Canada
, retrieved October 22, 2012, from
http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/management/a/recessionproof.htm
.

38   
the person himself regrets it
:
The idea that we are at conflict with ourselves—that we do something that we ourselves do not want us to do—has a rich history. Most often it is viewed as a consequence of self-control problems. See, e.g., T. C. Schelling, “Self-Command
in Practice, in Policy and in a Theory of Rational Choice,”
American Economic Review
74 (1984): 1–11.

41   
the single umbrella term
bandwidth
:
Bandwidth, or computational capacity, has been studied under various guises, including several measures of intelligence, reasoning ability, short-term memory capacity, working-memory capacity, fluid intelligence, cognitive control, executive control, control of attention, conflict monitoring, and so forth. For professional researchers, some of these capture relevant distinctions, which are largely beyond our current scope. (Some researchers, for example, have posited that working-memory capacity is the prime component underlying many other measures; see, e.g., R. W. Engle, “Working Memory Capacity as Executive Attention,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
11 (2002): 19–23.)

42   
the conditions of a school in New Haven
:
A. L. Bronzaft, “The Effect of a Noise Abatement Program on Reading Ability,”
Journal of Environmental Psychology
1, no. 3 (1981): 215–22; A. L. Bronzaft and D. P. McCarthy, “The Effect of Elevated Train Noise on Reading Ability,”
Environment and Behavior
7, no. 4 (1975): 517–28. doi:10.1177/001391657500700406.

42   
the powerful effects of even slight distraction
:
A major focus in cognitive psychology has been the role of distraction in cognitive performance, particularly as it interacts with attention and cognitive load. Even supposedly minor distractions have been shown to have profound effects, often far beyond what intuition would suggest. Experimental studies of the effects of distraction have ranged from response time experiments to the use of simulators and to field studies and have looked at tasks as diverse as visual, auditory, and pain perception, driving, surgery, work performance, and educational attainment.

44   
Behavioral and neuroimaging studies
:
Several studies by Lavie and colleagues have documented increased attentional capture by salient distractors during high memory load. In one study, for example, two unrelated tasks—visual attention and working memory—were combined. Increased load in the working memory
task was predicted to lower people’s ability to avoid visual distractors. Imagine participating in this rather unusual experiment. You stare at a computer monitor and see a sequence of digits, say, 0, 3, 1, 2, 4, which you need to memorize. Then, you see famous names appear on the screen, which you are asked to classify as pop stars or politicians. The names are accompanied by faces, which you are asked to ignore. Then, at some point a digit appears, say, a 2, and your task is to report the digit that follows in the sequence you memorized (in this case, 4.) To make this more interesting, there are two variations. First, the load manipulation: under high memory load, the sequence of digits to memorize was different on each trial, whereas under low memory load, the digits were in a fixed order: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. Clearly, you’d need to rehearse the fixed order sequence hardly at all, whereas the novel sequences would need to be actively rehearsed. In addition, the faces to be ignored changed: in the low distraction condition, the faces and names were “congruent”; Bill Clinton’s face appeared with his name, and so did Mick Jagger’s. But in the high distraction condition, these were incongruent: Clinton’s face appeared with Jagger’s name, and vice versa. This turns out to be quite distracting! And it turns out to be a lot more distracting when your working memory is loaded. The impact of the incongruent faces was much greater when people were under high-as opposed to low-memory load. See N. Lavie, “Distracted and Confused?: Selective Attention under Load,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
9, no. 2 (2005): 75–82.