Articles: Cognitive Exhaustion

Many power brokers believe in the myth of their own “fitness”

It is human nature, as strongly indicated by social psychology research, that those in power more readily consider themselves to be individuals who deserve their good fortune simply by virtue of belonging to the inner circle of wealth and influence. However, in most cases they did not pull themselves “up by their bootstraps” or attain success because of superior qualities of “ruggedness” or “rationality".

Findings from social psychology experiments have underscored the tendency for actor-observer bias. All of us tend to attribute our good fortune to our own merit, and the misfortune of others to their flaws or incompetence.

Most successful people were given many a boost: educational, financial and social— coming in many forms: investors, mentors, patrons, family resources, advice and counsel, invitations to the right clubs and events, opportunities for schmoozing and networking. They also have better access to loans, investments, allowances, dividends, rebates, etc.

People maintain their positions with the help of countless back-ups: assistants, secretaries, housekeepers, nannies, and the spouses who create smoothly running households and track all aspects of family life.

We take our shared bounty for granted

On a wider scale, a large percentage of people living in wealthy and stable nations take for granted the many services in place that ease daily life and provide opportunities for flourishing beyond mere subsistence.

Poverty Lowers IQ: How Financial Strains Put Pressure On Cognitive, Logical Reasoning
From www.medicaldaily.com - August 30, 2013
Poverty can sap a person's mental resources, lowering his or her IQ and impairing the individual's impulse control.

How Poverty Taxes the Brain
From www.theatlanticcities.com -August 29, 2013:
Scientists have discovered that being poor actually impairs our cognitive abilities.

Poverty saps mental capacity to deal with complex tasks, say ...
From www.theguardian.com -October 1, 2013
Study suggests being preoccupied with money problems is equivalent to loss of 13 IQ points or losing a night's sleep.

How poverty depletes brain power
From www.deseretnews.com -October 31, 2013
New research shows that poverty itself may use up people's limited mental bandwidth, causing them to make worse decisions that contribute to their poverty.

What Poverty And Insomnia Have In Common
From bigthink.com - August 30, 2013
What's the Latest Development?
A study published this week in Science describes experiments done on two groups of people to determine how the mental stresses associated with poverty affected their decision-making.

Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions
From www.theatlantic.com - November 22, 2013
Shoppers at a food pantry. (Reuters)In August, Science published a landmark study concluding that poverty, itself, hurts our ability to make decisions about school, finances, and life, imposing a mental burden similar to losing 13 IQ points. It...

How Poverty Takes Over the Mind
From www.bloomberg.com -November 27, 2013
Suppose you got no sleep last night and you have to take an intelligence test today. If you’re like most people, you’re not going to do so well on that test.

Feeling powerless increases the weight of the world... literally
From medicalxpress.com - February 4, 2014
Scientists have found that people who feel powerless actually see the world differently, and find a task to be more physically challenging than those with a greater sense of personal and social power.

Making Decisions Under the Influence of Poverty
From www.slate.com - July 28, 2014
Your Brain on Bandwidth Poverty.
The Gist discusses how a lack of money, time, and attention can affect the way we make decisions.

The Mermaid's Tale: The fluidity of fluid intelligence
From ecodevoevo.blogspot.com - March 27, 2014
If IQ is a measure of some aspects of intelligence, and intelligence is the product of a gene or genes, then it should follow that IQ is a stable trait during an individual's lifetime. So I was interested to hear on a recent episode of the BBC radio program,Analysis, that IQ can change even over the course of participation in a brief psychological study.

Princeton professor of psychology and public affairs, Eldar Shafir, co-author of the book, with economist Sendhil Mullainathan, "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much", was interviewed on the program about how having too little time or money influences our lives. Mullainathan and Shafir believe that experiencing scarcity changes the way we think, and makes a bad situation even worse; poverty creates a "scarcity mind-set" and causes poor people to make bad decisions, which perpetuates their poverty.

To test this, they interviewed people shopping in a mall in New Jersey, determined their financial status, presented them with various financial scenarios and then asked them to play computer games that measured their 'fluid intelligence', a component of IQ that indicates things like the ability to think logically, to reason, or to handle novel situations.

The Great IQ Depression
From westhunt.wordpress.com -March 8, 2014
We hear that poverty can sap brainpower, reduce frontal lobe function, induce the fantods, etc. But exactly what do we mean by ‘poverty’?

Inequality (Papers)
Inequality Effects (blog posts and articles)

Research is showing that the daily struggle of living without a stable safety net, paycheck to paycheck, creates countless stressors (mostly ignored by economists) that accumulate to add to an "allostatic load" that makes it more difficult to cope with multiple decisions and to take advantage of opportunities. Yet, the "haves" often have implicit prejudice towards those who are supposedly "less fit" for not being entrepreneurial or not having enough gumption to "make it" on their own.

What Romney doesn’t understand about personal responsibility
Posted by Ezra Klein on September 20, 2012
Washington Post Wonkblog
The poor use up an enormous amount of their mental energy just getting by. They’re not dumber or lazier or more interested in being dependent on the government. They’re just cognitively exhausted

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
By JOHN TIERNEY
August 17, 2011
The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky.

Why You Need to Sleep On It
By JOHN TIERNEY
Suffering from decision fatigue? You may be expending your finite amount of willpower too early in the day.

Squeezing Thoughts: Cognitive exhaustion
Sep 22, 2012

The Exhaustion Of Barely Getting
By laurustina
DailyKos
Sep 20, 2012

How exhaustion affects our moral compass
The Globe and Mail
Jun 6, 2011

The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less
From www.nytimes.com -September 22, 2013
The constant distraction of restricting calorie intake strains the mental capacity of dieters; in a similar way, poverty is a strain on the poor.

The Truth About Workaholics
The Fix / By Chris Wright
October 13, 2012
A batch of new studies reveal the issue of overworking should be taken extremely seriously.

WHY YOU SHOULD SHUT UP WHEN POOR PEOPLE BUY NEW NIKES
by Lisa Wade, PhD, January 2, 2015
When it comes to forming an opinion on poverty, some Americans just can’t seem to understand why poor people can’t just stop being poor. One of the things that gets harped on is the idea that poor people spend money on frivolous things; somehow some people believe that, if the poor just gave up their cell phone and Nikes, they would pop up into the middle class.

What these people don’t realize is the extent to which being poor is living a life of self-denial. To be poor is to be forced to deny oneself constantly.

Responding to David Brooks: The Question of Poverty and Character
From www.huffingtonpost.com -August 6, 2014
Focusing on issues of character and choice, when discussing poverty, suits conservatives because it emphasizes the causal role of "agency" rather than "structure" in the creation of social problems....

Poverty has been rebranded as personal failure
From www.theguardian.com - April 22, 2014
Disabled people in this country are twice as likely to live in poverty.

When feeling poor makes you sick: Subjective poverty massively affects older people’s health
From www.psypost.org - February 24, 2014
Being objectively low income leads to poor health and a shorter life. This much we already knew. But poverty can also be a matter of subjectively feeling poor.

The real brain drain: How unemployment depletes cognitive and emotional resources
From sharpbrains.com - February 28, 2015
“Unemployment is no cakewalk. It’s well documented that an involuntary jobless state can take a steep toll on one’s emotional and physical health, and now new research illuminates a more subtle, if highly corrosive, consequence the inability to find work can have on a person. In short, it appears that unemployment has the power to change what we generally consider relatively fixed – i.e., it can alter our personality, making us less agreeable and less conscientious, while affecting our levels of openness, according to a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology…Self-reported personality results for the employed changed little from the first test to the second, but self-evaluations by the unemployed – particularly those who had been out of work for a long time –changed significantly. Levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness were all depleted.

“The results are consistent with the view that personality changes as a function of contextual and environmental factors,” they write.