The cognitive load of poverty: From attention mechanisms to the role of income inequality

International audiencePoverty is a phenomenon that tends to persist and reproduce itself (i.e., the ”vicious circle of poverty”). Whereassocial sciences have focused on the structural and political dynamics subtending the vicious circle of poverty,behavioral sciences have rather focused on individuals’ behaviors that further perpetuate poverty. In that vein,Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao (2013) have proposed that low-income individuals would behave ininappropriate ways because poverty imposes a cognitive load (via intrusive thoughts and worries), whichimpedes cognitive functioning and subsequent behavior. In series of studies, they found that financial concernsdecreased low-income individuals performance on fluid intelligence and cognitive control tasks. The presentresearch (3 studies) first aims at identifying the attention mechanisms involved the cognitive load of poverty(studies 1-2). Intrusive thoughts and worries may indeed highjack attention resources from any other ongoingactivity, thereby leading to performance decrements. Study 1 (online; N = 103 all comers adults) tested whetherlow-income individuals’ attention is exhausted by concurrent financial concerns. Participants were randomlyassigned to one of the two conditions involving an experimental induction of either low or high financialconcerns. While thinking about how to solve these problems, participants performed a visual search game (20Where’s Waldo puzzles) of various difficulty levels. Participants’ household income was finally collected. Aspredicted, in the high-financial concerns condition, the lower the participants’ income the longer it took them toperform the difficult visual task puzzles, thereby suggesting a shortfall of selective attention resources. Study 2(lab experiment; N = 179 undergraduate students) further investigated the attention processes potentiallyimpacted by the cognitive load of poverty by using the Attentional Network Test allowing to assess threeattentional components: alerting, orienting and executive components. Given that suppressing interferingthoughts solicits executive control, we hypothesized that low-income students specifically experience executiveattention impairments when high-financial concerns are experimentally induced. However and contrary to Study1 (and to most studies in the literature), participants in Study 2 were undergraduate students whose currentfinancial situation was hard to assess given the diversity of social situations among students. As a consequenceour main IV (income) was not usable. Based on the literature, maternal level of education was then chosen as aproxy for poverty. Results thus only provided a partial support for our prediction by showing that not incomebut maternal education positively predicted students’ executive attention performance in the high-financialconcerns condition. As it happens, studying the psychological impact of poverty requires going beyond the mereindicator of income. Study 3 (online; N = 776 US adults) therefore aimed at investigating how incomeinequalities may further fuel the cognitive load of poverty. Based on the same design as Study 1, resultssuggested that for participants living in areas heavily marked by income inequality (as measured by the GINIcoefficient), the lower their income and the lower their performance on the visual search task. Limits of andperspectives on the cognitive load of poverty hypothesis are further discussed