Understanding and Overcoming Hate
  • Home
    • Content Previews
    • Petition to American Electrorate
  • Overview
    • Site Contents
    • About This Site
    • Features
    • Future Developments
    • Index of All Topics
    • Index of All Links
    • Links to all slideshows
  • Understanding Hate
    • Introduction
    • What is Hate? >
      • Hate as an Emotion >
        • Papers: Hate as an Emotion
      • Hate as a Belief >
        • Papers: Hate as Belief
      • Hate as an Act >
        • Papers: Hate as an Act
      • Hate as a Policy >
        • Papers: Hate as Policy
    • The Roots of Hate >
      • Early Imprints >
        • When Needs are Not Met
        • Papers; Not Meeting Needs
      • What Are We Doing To Our Children? >
        • Children in Dire Circumstances
      • Effects of Trauma and Abuse >
        • Papers: Stress Effects
        • Papers: Trauma Abuse Effects
        • Links: Stress, Trauma Research
      • Causes and Effects of Bullying
      • Trauma, bigotry, violence linked
      • Authoritarian Upbringings >
        • Papers: Authoritarian Roots
        • Papers: SDO and Authoritarianism
      • Absolutism and Insularity >
        • Papers: Absolutism
      • Papers: Early Roots of Prejudice
      • Impaired Cognition >
        • Papers: Impaired Cognition
      • The Violent Brain >
        • Papers: Violent Brain
      • Roots of Violence and Cruelty >
        • Chart: Powderkeg Formula
        • Papers: Roots of Violence
        • Articles and Blog Posts
      • Ghosts of the Past >
        • Ripples of revenge
        • Papers: Ghosts of the Past
    • How Hate Manifests >
      • Chart
      • Everyday Hate >
        • Papers: Social Rejection
        • Papers: Bullying
      • Social Injustice and Discrimination >
        • Papers: Discrimination
        • Papers: Inequality
        • Articles: Inequality Effects
        • Articles: Cognitive Exhaustion
        • "White" Privilege
      • Stereotyping and Caricature >
        • Papers: Stereotyping
        • Stereotyping
      • Prejudice, Racism and Bigotry >
        • Articles and Blog Posts
        • Papers: Prejudice Racism
        • Papers: Skin color and face
        • Papers: InGroup Outgroup
        • Papers: Implicit Bias
        • Evolutionary Issues >
          • More blog posts
      • Dehumanizing >
        • Views about the outsider
        • Papers: Dehumanizing
      • Hate Crimes >
        • Papers: Hate Crimes
      • Hate Groups >
        • Links: Hate Groups Research
        • Papers and news: Hate Groups
      • Abuse of Power >
        • Papers: Abuse of Power
        • Evil Men: Tyrants, Dictators
        • Blogs and news
        • Articles: SDO and RWA
      • Xenophobia >
        • Papers: Xenophobia
      • Collective Rage >
        • Papers: Collective Violence
      • Extremism >
        • Papers: Terrorism
        • Papers: Extremism
      • Cruelty on Mass Scale >
        • Links
        • Papers: Cruelty on mass scale
    • Hate in the News >
      • News: Hate in America
      • News: Hate Trends Worldwide
      • Extremism: Current Trends: News
      • Authoritarianism Trends
    • Group Influence >
      • Search for Belonging >
        • Papers: Search for Belonging
      • Social Cognition and Learning >
        • Papers: Fairness
        • Papers: Social Cognition
      • Group Think >
        • Papers: Intergroup Dynamics
        • Papers: Group Think
      • Status and Stigma >
        • Papers: Status and Stigma
      • Conformity >
        • Papers: Conformity
      • Obedience and Compliance >
        • Papers: Obedience
      • Bystander Effect
    • Social Defenses >
      • Papers: Social Defenses
      • System Justification >
        • Papers: System Justification
      • Projection >
        • Papers: Projection
      • Denial >
        • Papers: Denial
        • Examples of Denial
        • Papers: Denialism
      • Attribution and Comparison >
        • Attribution Fallacies
        • Papers: Attribution
      • Cognitive Dissonance >
        • Papers: Cognitive Dissonance
    • Fanning the Flames >
      • Media and Persuasion
      • Papers: Persuasion
      • Papers: Indoctrination
      • Papers: Hate Speech
      • Papers: Attitude change
      • News: Cyberhate
      • Links
      • Media Effects in the News
      • Persuasion: Blog Posts and Articles
    • How We Fool Ourselves >
      • Mechanisms: Cognitive Biases and Heuristics >
        • Papers: Brain Tricks
        • Biases: Blogs and Articles
        • Biases organized
      • On Being Wrong
      • Probability and Decision-Making Biases >
        • Papers and articles
      • Memory Distortions >
        • Papers: Memory illusions
      • Perceptual Illusions >
        • Papers: Perceptual Illusions
        • Illusions: Blog Posts and Articles
      • Self-Deception >
        • Papers: Self-deception
      • Delusion, Confabulation >
        • Papers: Delusions
        • Papers: False Beliefs
      • Conspiracy Theories
      • Papers: Neural mechanisms mystical states
      • Brain and Spirituality: Articles
    • Brain and Belief >
      • What is a Belief? >
        • Papers: Belief Formation
        • Papers: Automaticity
      • Perception and Processing >
        • Papers: Perception
      • Salience and Tagging >
        • Papers: Salience
        • Papers: Essentialism
      • Creating Categories >
        • Papers: Categorizing
      • Cognitive Unconscious
      • Embodied Cognition >
        • Papers: Embodied Cognition
      • Emotion Cognition Interplay >
        • Papers
      • Creating a Story about the World >
        • Papers: Story Creation
      • Investing in Cherished Beliefs >
        • Papers
      • Identifying Self with Belief >
        • Papers
      • Search for Meaning >
        • Papers: Meaning
    • Search for Certainty >
      • Dogmatic Beliefs
      • Belief Perseverance
      • Papers: Feeling of Knowing
      • Papers: Rigid Dogmatic thinking
    • Index: All Biases, Distortions and Influences
  • Overcoming Hate
    • Overview of Topics
    • Introduction
    • Prevention >
      • Meeting Formative Needs of Children >
        • Papers: Child and Brain Development
        • Papers: nurturing, attachment bonding
        • Links: Development
      • Promoting Parental readiness >
        • Papers
        • Links: Helping Parents
      • Supporting Healthy Families >
        • Papers
      • Enhancing Resilience >
        • Papers
      • Cultivating Empathy and Conscience >
        • Roots of Morality
        • Empathic Imagination
        • Mirror Neurons
        • Empathy Programs
        • Links: Empathy
      • All papers: Morality and Empathy >
        • Papers: Roots of Morality and Conscience
        • Papers: Empathy Altruism Compassion
        • Articles, Posts: Empathy
        • Papers: Moral Decision-Making
        • Papers: Moral Cognition
        • Papers: Mirror Neurons
        • Articles: Prosocial Behavior
      • Long-Term Social Investment >
        • Papers
    • Education >
      • Enhancing Emotional and Social Skills >
        • Papers: Emotional Intelligence
        • Papers: Social Cooperation
        • Links: emotional development
      • Building Reflective Minds >
        • Critical Thinking >
          • Papers: Critical Thinking
        • Metacognition >
          • Papers: Metacognition
        • Perceiving Bias >
          • Papers: Perceiving Bias
        • Creative and Lateral Thinking >
          • Papers: Creative Thinking
        • Mindfulness >
          • Papers: Mindfulness
          • Blogs and articles
        • Interoception >
          • Papers: Interoception
        • Fluid and Flexible >
          • Papers: Fluid Intelligence
      • Cross-cultural Awareness >
        • Links: Cross-Cultural
        • Papers: Cultural Neuroscience
        • Articles: Cultural Awareness
      • Media Awareness >
        • Links
        • Papers
      • Teaching an Honest History >
        • Papers
        • Links: Honest History
      • Civic Engagement and Social Responsibility >
        • Papers
      • Ethics Training >
        • Papers
      • Whole Child Learning >
        • Papers
    • Intervention >
      • Social Support and Inclusion >
        • Papers: Social Support
      • Helping Children in Dire Conditions >
        • Papers: Helping children
      • Preventing Violence and Bullying >
        • Anti-bullying programs and resources
        • Helping At-Risk Kids
        • Papers on helping kids
      • Standing Up To Prejudice, Racism, and Bigotry >
        • Papers: Reducing Prejudice
        • Articles: Reducing Prejudice
        • Papers: Stopping hate crimes
        • Papers: Offsetting Extremism
        • Programs and Projects
        • Hatebraker Examples: News
      • Training Our Protectors >
        • Papers: Training Protectors
      • Healing the Hurt >
        • Papers: Healing Hurt
        • Articles and Blog Posts
      • Educating Our Leaders >
        • Papers: Educating Leaders
      • Resolving Conflict >
        • Papers: Resolving Conflict
        • Programs and articles
      • Israel-Palestine >
        • Papers: Israel-Palestine
        • News and blog posts
      • Promoting Dignity >
        • Links: Human Rights
        • Papers: Human Rights
      • Healing the Ghosts of the Past >
        • Papers: Reconciliation
      • Restorative Justice >
        • Papers: Restorative Justice
      • Confronting Mass Atrocities >
        • Papers: Confronting War Crimes
    • Social Advances >
      • Charters and Declarations
      • Slideshow: Social Advances
      • Links: social advances history
      • Timelines: Social Advances
    • More Solutions >
      • Classroom Tools
      • Organizations
      • Programs and Projects
      • Effective Models
  • Resources
    • Academic Papers: Topic Index
    • Background: Sciences Related to Hate >
      • Related Sciences of Hate
      • Social Psychology Subtopics
      • Brain and Life Sciences
      • New Research Tools
      • Links: Brain Mapping
      • Process of Science
      • What is Good Science?
      • Links: Understanding Science
      • Papers: About Good Science
    • Science Links
    • Timelines of Knowledge >
      • Index of all Pioneers
      • Timeline: Early Pioneers
      • Timeline: Group Psychology
      • Timeline: Prejudice
      • Timeline: Persuasion
      • Timeline: Social Psychology Pioneers
      • Timeline: Authoritarianism
      • Timeline: Scientific bias
    • Researchers and Experts >
      • Developmental Foundations
      • Moral Cognition, Empathy
      • Search for Meaning
      • Search for Belonging
      • Search for Certainty
      • Ghosts of the Past
      • Breaking Cycle of Hate: Solutions
    • Other Research and Studies >
      • Syllabi
      • Bibliographies
      • Our Syllabi
    • Recommendations >
      • Books: Topic Overview >
        • Development
        • Empathy, Morality
        • Brain and Belief
        • Tricks of Mind
        • Stress, Trauma, Violence
        • Prejudice, Racism, Stereotyping
        • Overcoming Prejudice, Racism
        • Historical Insight
        • Human Rights Abuses
        • Seminal Works
      • Journals and Magazines
      • Films and Videos
    • Timeline of Hate >
      • Links: Historical Injustice
      • History of Hate in America: articles
      • Index of Historical Injustice
  • Tools
    • Links: Games and Exercises
    • Self-Awareness Tools >
      • What Parents Can do
      • Learning about our Labels
    • Blog

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. 

Picture
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.

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

Picture
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.

Picture
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.

Picture
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.

Picture
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...

Picture
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.

Picture
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. 

Picture
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’?

Related Pages
  • 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
Picture
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. 
Picture
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....

Picture
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.

Picture
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.

Picture
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.