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"Shafir, Eldar"
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Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function
The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks. These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors among the poor. We discuss some implications for poverty policy.
Journal Article
Some Consequences of Having Too Little
Poor individuals often engage in behaviors, such as excessive borrowing, that reinforce the conditions of poverty. Some explanations for these behaviors focus on personality traits of the poor. Others emphasize environmental factors such as housing or financial access. We instead consider how certain behaviors stem simply from having less. We suggest that scarcity changes how people allocate attention: It leads them to engage more deeply in some problems while neglecting others. Across several experiments, we show that scarcity leads to attentional shifts that can help to explain behaviors such as overborrowing. We discuss how this mechanism might also explain other puzzles of poverty.
Journal Article
Scarcity Frames Value
Economic models of decision making assume that people have a stable way of thinking about value. In contrast, psychology has shown that people's preferences are often malleable and influenced by normatively irrelevant contextual features. Whereas economics derives its predictions from the assumption that people navigate a world of scarce resources, recent psychological work has shown that people often do not attend to scarcity. In this article, we show that when scarcity does influence cognition, it renders people less susceptible to classic context effects. Under conditions of scarcity, people focus on pressing needs and recognize the trade-offs that must be made against those needs. Those trade-offs frame perception more consistently than irrelevant contextual cues, which exert less influence. The results suggest that scarcity can align certain behaviors more closely with traditional economic predictions.
Journal Article
What's Advertising Content Worth? Evidence from a Consumer Credit Marketing Field Experiment
Firms spend billions of dollars developing advertising content, yet there is little field evidence on how much or how it affects demand. We analyze a direct mail field experiment in South Africa implemented by a consumer lender that randomized advertising content, loan price, and loan offer deadlines simultaneously. We find that advertising content significantly affects demand. Although it was difficult to predict ex ante which specific advertising features would matter most in this context, the features that do matter have large effects. Showing fewer example loans, not suggesting a particular use for the loan, or including a photo of an attractive woman increases loan demand by about as much as a 25% reduction in the interest rate. The evidence also suggests that advertising content persuades by appealing “peripherally” to intuition rather than reason. Although the advertising content effects point to an important role for persuasion and related psychology, our deadline results do not support the psychological prediction that shorter deadlines may help overcome time-management problems; instead, demand strongly increases with longer deadlines.
Journal Article
Economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces
Impressions of competence from faces predict important real-world outcomes, including electoral success and chief executive officer selection. Presumed competence is associated with social status. Here we show that subtle economic status cues in clothes affect perceived competence from faces. In nine studies, people rated the competence of faces presented in frontal headshots. Faces were shown with different upper-body clothing rated by independent judges as looking ‘richer’ or ‘poorer’, although not notably perceived as such when explicitly described. The same face when seen with ‘richer’ clothes was judged significantly more competent than with ‘poorer’ clothes. The effect persisted even when perceivers were exposed to the stimuli briefly (129 ms), warned that clothing cues are non-informative and instructed to ignore the clothes (in one study, with considerable incentives). These findings demonstrate the uncontrollable effect of economic status cues on person perception. They add yet another hurdle to the challenges faced by low-status individuals.
Subtle economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces even when perceivers are warned that such cues are non-informative or are instructed and incentivized to ignore them. This bias puts low-income individuals at a disadvantage.
Journal Article
The full moon and motorcycle related mortality: population based double control study
AbstractObjectiveTo test whether a full moon contributes to motorcycle related deaths.DesignPopulation based, individual level, double control, cross sectional analysis.SettingNighttime (4 pm to 8 am), United States.Participants13 029 motorcycle fatalities throughout the United States, 1975 to 2014 (40 years).Main outcome measureMotorcycle fatalities during a full moon.Results13 029 motorcyclists were in fatal crashes during 1482 relevant nights. The typical motorcyclist was a middle aged man (mean age 32 years) riding a street motorcycle with a large engine in a rural location who experienced a head-on frontal impact and was not wearing a helmet. 4494 fatal crashes occurred on the 494 nights with a full moon (9.10/night) and 8535 on the 988 control nights without a full moon (8.64/night). Comparisons yielded a relative risk of 1.05 associated with the full moon (95% confidence interval 1.02 to 1.09, P=0.005), a conditional odds ratio of 1.26 (95% confidence interval 1.17 to 1.37, P<0.001), and an absolute increase of 226 additional deaths over the study interval. The increase extended to diverse types of motorcyclists, vehicles, and crashes; was accentuated during a supermoon; and replicated in analyses from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.ConclusionThe full moon is associated with an increased risk of fatal motorcycle crashes, although potential confounders cannot be excluded. An awareness of the risk might encourage motorcyclists to ride with extra care during a full moon and, more generally, to appreciate the power of seemingly minor distractions at all times.
Journal Article
Daniel Kahneman obituary: psychologist who revolutionized the way we think about thinking
Nobel prizewinner whose insights into the foibles of human decision-making launched the field of behavioural economics and sent ripples through all social sciences.
Nobel prizewinner whose insights into the foibles of human decision-making launched the field of behavioural economics and sent ripples through all social sciences.
Portrait of Daniel Kahneman in an armchair in his home
Journal Article