Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (9 page)

Before notching this as a victory for our theory, however, a few doors must be shut. We know that scarcity (poverty) changes before and after harvest. But are there other things that change with it? And if so, might these be the drivers of the psychic changes? Three alternatives stand out.

First, if the farmers are poorer preharvest, might they also be eating less? If so, would it be such a surprise then to find that their cognitive function was also lower?
Worse nutrition and simple hunger
could leave anyone’s brain in a weakened state. For our farmers, though, this was not the case. These farmers are not so poor when they are short on cash that they are forced to cut back on food. If anything, they spent slightly less money on food postharvest. Although we find that they spend less preharvest, they do not spend less on food. Instead, they spend less on other things that matter. For example, they might give a cousin a smaller gift for his wedding. In a culture like India’s, where gift giving is not simply a bonus but an obligation (a repayment of past gifts), such cutbacks can be painful.

Second, might they not be working harder preharvest? Preparing for harvest is hard work and might leave farmers tired. Physical exhaustion could easily bring mental exhaustion. In fact, our surveys sufficiently preceded the actual harvest date (four weeks is a long time in agriculture) that preparation for harvest had not started in any serious way. Farmers were not working any more or harder in the preharvest week than in the postharvest week.

Finally, harvest time is not only when you get your money; it’s also when you find out how much you got. Farming is notoriously variable. Some harvests are bountiful, others meager. Could the simple anxiety of not knowing what he will earn affect the farmer’s mental state? For some crops, such as rice, this is a serious concern. But not so with sugar cane. By surveying his land, a farmer can readily estimate his income. Almost all the crop growth has happened several months before harvest. The last months are just to increase the sugar
content of the crop, not its volume. But this is the mill’s problem: the farmers get paid solely on volume, not on sugar content. The only reason farmers do not harvest earlier is that the sugar mill does not allow it. In short, several months ahead of time farmers have an accurate understanding of how much they will get paid. They know as much before as they do after the harvest.

There are other minor quibbles
we could discuss. But the bottom line is clear. Poverty
itself
taxes the mind. Even without an experimenter around to remind us of scarcity, poverty reduces fluid intelligence and executive control. Returning to where we started, this suggests a major twist in the debate over the cognitive capacity of the poor. We would argue that the poor do have lower
effective
capacity than those who are well off. This is not because they are less capable, but rather because part of their mind is captured by scarcity.

About that time, it occurred to me
that I was succeeding in the world with only part of my brain engaged. While a tenth of it was devoted to school, a tenth devoted to my daughter, and perhaps another tenth devoted to family crises and illnesses, the other 70 percent of my mind was constantly focused on food—the calorie count of a grape, the filling bulk of popcorn, the clever use of water as a placebo. “How much farther,” I thought, “can I go in the world if I use that 70 percent more wisely?”

—
NATALIE KUSZ, “THE FAT LADY SINGS”

We all understand that dieting can be hard: resisting tasty foods can be difficult for all of us. The bandwidth tax, however, suggests that dieting is more than hard. It is mentally taxing. Dieters, when doing anything, should find they have fewer mental resources
because they are partly preoccupied with food
. In fact, this is what a few studies
have shown. They have compared dieters to nondieters on various cognitive measures, the kind that psychologists use to gauge effective cognitive capacity. Sometimes they compare restrained eaters to nonrestrained eaters. Sometimes they compare the same person over time, during periods when he is dieting compared to periods when he is not. However they do it, they find the same effect. 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.

These results do not appear to come
from a simple lack of calories
. Not surprisingly (since many of those who attempt to diet fail), the effects appear even in cases where there is no weight loss. Furthermore, direct physiological measures show that nutritional deficiencies do not cause these cognitive impairments. Think of it this way—while losing weight you are preoccupied and face a bandwidth tax. But if you are able to settle into a new equilibrium and find yourself no longer needing to restrain eating, then the bandwidth tax disappears. Of course, one can poke holes in these data: dieters and nondieters may differ for other reasons. More research will be needed to quantify the size of the bandwidth tax for dieters, but it is striking that the results around calorie scarcity mirror what we have found in studying income scarcity.

Something similar happens with the lonely. One study gave lonely and nonlonely subjects a different kind of bandwidth measure, a rather elegant procedure called
a
dichotic listening task
. Subjects are asked to listen to two different sounds, one in each ear. They might hear a woman’s voice in one ear and a man’s voice in the other. The test measures how well people can track one ear and shut out the distraction coming in from the other. This test relies on an interesting fact about the brain: brain lateralization. Most people are right-ear dominant for language, which means that
verbal information presented to the right ear is easier
for them to attend to. When given no
instructions, they tend to focus on the voice presented to the right ear. In fact, when asked to track what was said in the right ear, the lonely and the nonlonely did equally well. In contrast, focusing on the nondominant ear—the left ear—requires bandwidth. It requires executive control to override the natural proclivity to focus on the right and instead to attend to the left. And
now the lonely did significantly less well
. They were less effective at overriding their natural urge, less effective at tuning out the right ear and listening to the left. The lonely in other words showed impaired bandwidth—in this case, lesser executive control.

In other studies, researchers did something similar to what we did at the mall. They had subjects fill out what they thought were personality tests, and then, by random assignment, they gave these subjects feedback leading them to believe the tests clearly indicated they were going to be
either socially well adjusted or else very lonely
. They randomly, and instantaneously, created perceived scarcity by leading their subjects to anticipate loneliness. After the information had sunk in, they gave the subjects a Raven’s test and found that those who anticipated being lonely did much worse. In fact, when they placed subjects in the scanner, they saw that making people think they would be lonely reduced activation of the executive control areas of the brain. Finally, 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
. 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
.

Finally, we see similar effects even for artificial scarcity. Recall the Angry Blueberries study from
chapter 1
. We have found in similar games that the “poor” subjects (those given fewer resources in the game)
do worse on the heart–flower task
after having played the game. Even though (being poor) they play far shorter games, they are so focused that they have less bandwidth at the end. Like the dieters, the money poor, and the lonely, these blueberry-poor subjects are taxed by scarcity.

Of
course, scarcity is not the only thing that can tax bandwidth. Imagine you had a fight with your spouse one morning. You might not be very productive at work. You might look and act “dumber” that day. You might not hold your tongue when you should. Part of your bandwidth is being used up fussing, fretting, and maybe fuming over the fight. You, too, would have less brain left for everything else. Under this view, everyone has concerns and needs that can tax the mind.

What, then, is so special about scarcity?

Scarcity, by its nature, is a clustering of several important concerns. Unlike a marital spat that can happen anywhere and to anyone, preoccupations with money and with time cluster around the poor and the busy, and they rarely let go. The poor must contend with persistent monetary concerns. The busy must contend with persistent time concerns. Scarcity predictably creates an additional load on top of all their other concerns. It consistently and predictably taxes bandwidth. Everyone can be preoccupied: rich and poor people fight with their spouses; rich and poor people can be flustered by their bosses. But whereas only some people who experience abundance will be preoccupied, everyone experiencing scarcity will be preoccupied.

This discussion raises another important question. In all this talk about scarcity, are we just referring to stress in a roundabout way? In everyday life,
stress
is used liberally, to mean many things. Scientifically, however, there has been
considerable progress in the understanding of stress
. We now have a firmer grasp of
the biochemistry of the generalized stress response
. We can even identify several of the molecules involved—glucocorticoids (such as cortisol), norepinephrine, and serotonin—as well as some of their function. This knowledge allows us to more carefully consider whether stress is the biological mechanism by which scarcity affects the mind.

There is, even in our data, some reason to think that stress plays some role. Predictably, experiencing scarcity can be stressful. In the
harvest study, for example, we found that postharvest farmers were less stressed than they were before harvest. We also found sizable reductions in heart rate variability, a frequently used measure of stress.

At the same time, stress is unlikely to be the primary driver of many of the effects we have observed. Some of the most important effects had to do with scarcity taxing what we have come to call bandwidth. Stress, in contrast, does not have these predictable effects. Some studies find that
stress
heightens
working memory
. Still other studies have found mixed evidence, including some indication that
executive control might improve during periods of stress
. Of course, the chronic effects of stress are still different, but the effects of scarcity that we have studied are immediate: in the mall study, simply reminding people about their money had an almost instantaneous effect on their mental capacity. In addition, we have shown a particular pattern of improved performance (the focus dividend) and diminished performance (the bandwidth tax), a pattern that anxiety and stress alone cannot explain.

Finally, to think of all of this as stress and worry misses a deeper point. The bandwidth tax is not a finding in isolation. It emerges from the same core mechanism as the focus dividend or the way tunneling shapes our choices. A focus on stress alone would miss these deeper connections and ultimately limit our understanding of the scarcity mindset.

The vignettes with which we opened this chapter may seem obvious in light of the bandwidth tax. You wouldn’t be surprised if the cashier hadn’t heard the order of fries just when a train passed by. So you (and her manager) shouldn’t be surprised if, lost in thought about how to make rent this month, she overlooks the order of fries. She is not being careless. She is preoccupied. Thoughts such as, Should I risk being late again on my credit card? can be every bit as loud as
a passing train. The manager with the impending sales pitch tries to focus on her daughter’s game. Yet before she knows it, she finds herself ruminating on the sales pitch. The student tries to focus on the exam at hand but is constantly interrupted by thoughts of the looming tuition bill. Even smiling and being pleasant is hard when your mind is taxed. The employee snaps at rude customers more often than she intends. The parent snaps at the child. A taxed bandwidth leads to carelessness. The student forgets his study group meeting. The server rings up the wrong item.

The bandwidth tax changes us in surprising and powerful ways. It is not merely its presence but also its magnitude that is surprising. Psychologists have spent decades documenting the impact of cognitive load on many aspects of behavior. Some of the most important are the behaviors captured in these vignettes: from distraction and forgetfulness to impulse control. The size of these effects suggests a substantial influence of the bandwidth tax on a full array of behaviors, even those like patience, tolerance, attention, and dedication that usually fall under the umbrella of “personality” or “talent.” So much of what we attribute to talent or personality is predicated on cognitive capacity and executive control. The restaurant manager looks to all the usual places to explain his employees’ behavior—lack of skill, no motivation, or insufficient education. And a taxed bandwidth can look like any of these. The harried sales manager, when she snaps at her daughter, looks like a bad parent. The financially strapped student who misses some easy questions looks incapable or lazy. But these people are not unskilled or uncaring, just heavily taxed. The problem is not the person but the context of scarcity.

Recall the metaphor of the computer slowed down by programs open in the background. Imagine you are sitting at that computer unaware of these other programs. As your browser crawls from page to page, you might draw the wrong conclusion. What a slow computer, you might think, confusing the processor loaded down by other tasks for one that is inherently slow. Similarly, it is easy to
confuse a mind loaded by scarcity for one that is inherently less capable. This, after all, is the attribution that the fast-food restaurant manager makes of his employees. Unlike the manager, we are emphatically not saying that poor people have less bandwidth. Quite the opposite. We are saying that all people, if they were poor, would have less effective bandwidth.