Amen! An effective antidote to the positive psychology crap of David Dobbs, Steve Cole, and Barbara Frederickson I was looking for in an earlier issue when I stumbled upon this. “The poor and the rich perform equally well in one context, and then when you impose the context of scarcity, all of a sudden [the poor] perform less well, even though it’s the same people.” OR CRITICS WHO INSIST that the authors have indeed confused the order of cause and effect—that the poor are poor because they lack intelligence and willpower, à la Romney’s 47 percent, and not the other way around—Shafir maintains that’s simply not the case. “In some sense, the most exciting part of our studies is that whatever it is you think made people poor, what I know is that everything we’re getting has to do very clearly with the context of being poor, not with the people themselves,” Shafir said. “The poor and the rich perform equally well in one context, and then when you impose the context of scarcity, all of a sudden [the poor] perform less well, even though it’s the same people.” "While what the authors are describing is somewhat different than stress—which, in the right quantities, can be a beneficial force for completing a task—all of this might seem rather obvious to those who live in chronic poverty or have undergone a period of financial hardship. Being broke is tough. Not only does a lack of money restrict what you can do, but now your survival also involves an endless amount of compromise over the most basic of goods and services. To return to the bandwidth metaphor, it’s like browsing the Internet while your computer downloads a file, ad infinitum. It’s impossible to stop dwelling on unpaid utility bills when you have absolutely no idea how you’re going to pay them. "But judging by America’s polarized political landscape, what’s commonsense to some isn’t common to all. In light of this, Shafir says he hopes the data will create an “empathy bridge” between the opposing camps, and perhaps also demystify the poor’s plight for some policymakers in Washington. Practical solutions the authors offer include automatically depositing wages into savings accounts and pill bottles that glow when they haven’t been opened in a while. Basically, anything that serves to liberate bandwidth.
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 14:50:12 +0000
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