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Analysis: How poverty can drive down intelligence
- andrewl 8y agoI'd never heard the term WEIRD people, who are from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic countries. Interesting.
- jxub 8y agoSounds like an acronym made up to make someone feel bad about the relatively good state of its society. Not really a fan of it.
- marchenko 8y agoI think the term is meant to draw attention to the fact that most study populations in psychology meet all of these criteria (a disproportionate number are college students, for example) and are statistically unrepresentative of the majority of humanity. Therefore their responses should be interpreted/extrapolated with caution - they are demographically "weird". It's not really intended to cast aspersions on the people themselves.
- Avshalom 8y agoYeah, I don't know if it's the origin of the phrase but College Students Are WIERD is the popularizer. The point being that a bunch of psychology undergrads taking surveys because it's required of them is not necessarily a good way to draw conclusions about the species.
- noaccount1256 8y agoWhat about humility as a virtue?
- ythn 8y agoThe general case seems to be "constant stress" not poverty itself.
- pjc50 8y ago> “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.” > And here’s the kicker: “This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress.”
- ythn 8y agoHow can they make that claim? Did they have a set of rich farmers under constant stress that did not have diminished cognitive performance? How does one scientifically measure stress?
- ItsMe000001 8y ago> How can they make that claim? How about your own claim? You can start with yourself, which should be much easier since if you want to ask the person something you just have to do it in your head.
- ItsMe000001 8y agoI repeat: How about your own claim? You can start with yourself, which should be much easier since if you want to ask the person something you just have to do it in your head. If you were even an iota as critical about your own content-free mutterings you could make the world a better place. Seriously.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoI do wonder though if seasons might affect cognition. How much time difference was there between "before harvest" and "after harvest"? Lots of farmers get a little depressed over the winter months.
- 8y ago
- eigen-vector 8y agoIntellect also sharpens and stays so only if you constantly exercise it. When you're too poor to pursue an intellectual job you end up doing menial labor which in turn means you're not exercising your intellect. Over time that inevitably leads to skill degradation.
- Pica_soO 8y agoIntellect is choosing between options. If you dont get to choose and usually circumstances or people in power determinate every aspect of your existence- this tool gets rusty.
- Andre_Wanglin 8y agoBut intelligence isn't a skill, it's a capability. The most interesting questions about it are what portion is fixed, what portion is influenced (dictated?) by environment, and which way the causation flows for correlated measurements. So, according to these "economists" being under financial duress affects intellectual performance. What does this tell us about the interesting questions? Would we be surprised to learn having cancer affects a sprinter's performance?
- chongli 8y agoYou can't measure intelligence, you can only measure skills. Any test you devise can be practiced to improve scores. Besides, it's hard even to define intelligence. Is Einstein more intelligent than Mozart? Our usual approach is to say "I know intelligence when I see it" but that usually results in arguments from personal incredulity.
- bradknowles 8y agoThere are tests that take that issue into account. Sure, you can study/practice and improve your score, but so can the other guy, and the relative difference between your scores remains largely the same.
- deleted 8y ago
- debunkaway726 8y agoor maybe not https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jelte_Wicherts/publication/259207757_Comment_on_Poverty_Impedes_Cognitive_Function/links/02e7e538dc0586180e000000/Comment-on-Poverty-Impedes-Cognitive-Function.pdf?origin=publication_detail https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jelte_Wicherts/publicat...
- Andre_Wanglin 8y ago>“We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks.” How is this not stress?
- mancerayder 8y agoI think there are class cultural habits ingrained that may ALSO play a role (the study described seems to talk about stress). I live surrounded by thousands of people in NYCHA housing, as well as live in an area with a poverty rate in the 40 percent range. Now, one thing that strikes me every day, and moreso in the warmer months, is the amount of noise people live within. In stores, a radio plays everything including commercials, while in the courtyards of the buildings people blast music at extremely high levels. And it's not the opera they're blasting, either. It's music that demands attention with massive bass. Cars park with their trunks open doing the same. Now if children grow up in these environments, how in the world can they have sharpened minds if they're assaulted by loud, distracting noise during every weekend and evening? I don't know how strong a factor this is globally, but I'm pretty confident it's something that should be researched and perhaps, just like we have nutritional health research and recommendations, we should also have 'environmental' ones that include noise levels and effects on children and stress. The poor need it more than anyone since they have no choice. The rest of us move (or help gentrify away noise, if I'm cynical).
- goldenkey 8y agoReally depends on the person. Many people like myself with ADD type symptoms get better focus by having background sensory input. Helps to alleviate boredom and fatigue. Of course, many things can still be obnoxious. Id agree having a choice is a better life
- mancerayder 8y agoThat's really interesting. I don't have ADD but I'm extremely sensitive to distractions - that includes noise (mostly). I wonder how much noisier the world has gotten given how many more people seem to be diagnosed with ADD.
- pasbesoin 8y agoIt's also counter to what many people with ADD experience and comment upon. Some people, including medical professionals, will lump me into the ADD camp; others not. The condition and diagnosis themselves seem broad and with unclear boundaries. Perhaps think of the "autistic spectrum" as a superficial (and insufficient; nonetheless) comparison. I'm very sensitive to human noise; I cannot "just tune it out" and concentrate despite its presence. I spent years, decades, struggling with aspects of school, work, society, that insisted I do and that I just needed to "get used to it". I agree with other comments here that greater consideration needs to be given to environment. For myself, people would wonder how the hell I did something ([I removed my examples as, in combination, they are a bit more personally identifying than I'd like to leave, here.]) But when it came to environment, no one was willing to listen to me. I didn't need enormous expenditure, just a simple accommodation. When I look at so many contemporary problems, one of my first thoughts is simply, "fix the environment". And have some basic belief in people, that wherever they're at, they'll actually tell you what they need. If you'll only listen. You haven't walked a mile in their shoes. So, don't presume to tell them how to do it. P.S. At home, I ended up with neighbors who blasted sub-woofer car stereos frequently and for hours on end, at times -- anytime between 8 am and 10 pm, and sometimes at 1 am when they got home and listened to a couple of songs while parked, before going in. For me, this triggered a very strong "fight or flight" reaction. And, when you are in that state -- when I am -- there is simply no access to higher-level cognitive functions and memory. They are simply "not there". There is no thinking yourself out of that problem, when you're in the midst of it. There is no thinking going on, on that level. I just saw a quote from a Martin Luther King Jr. interview (I haven't seen the interview, yet). It ran something like: You can't expect people to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' when they have no boots. People in poverty, in poor and dangerous neighborhoods, want better neighborhoods. Better schools. Jobs. Try giving them that. Instead of a bunch of guilt they don't really deserve, and often already have enough of -- internalized -- on their own. How do I know this? Through my own, different experience, where the few people who did respect and act upon what I asked for, got much better performance out of me. I have no problem with people who want a noisier environment. I really couldn't care less, and if it works for them, great! Just don't insist that it be my environment. (Nor that I perpetually pick up their slack.) (And, in case anyone wants to bring up "collaboration", I actually am quite good at it. I'd end up with connections throughout multinationals having 10's of thousands of employees. Genuine, and highly productive, connections. I didn't need to sit next to them and work all day to tune out their phone calls and cube meetings, in order to achieve this.)
- SamReidHughes 8y agoYou can read some criticism of the referenced paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_on_Poverty_Impedes_Cognitive_Function https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_o...
- allthenews 8y agoDo any of these studies even acknowledge the possibility that poverty may also select for individuals with low IQ? How can we take these studies seriously when there is such a taboo on asking uncomfortable questions?
- partycoder 8y agoIntelligence is has many dimensions. Poverty just keeps you busy trying to fulfill basic needs (like the lowest in Maslow's hierarchy of needs) and you can't pursue more abstract goals. Surviving while poor is not easy.
- indemnity 8y agoI had a brief taste of this in 2009, to the point I was briefly homeless. Until you have felt the ever present unease, fear for safety, and experienced how much mental bandwidth is taken up by simply trying to survive, you won’t understand, and it’s easy to toss off glib dismissals of people in this situation. In my time living in my car (already lucky that I had one to live in), I met all types when hanging out on the street. Labourers who had accidents and for one reason or another didn’t qualify for disability. An architect who had designed many of the residential towers in the CBD, but got hooked on meth and slowly squandered it all and alienated everyone who once cared for him. People like myself who had no support network nearby, and got the boot when the shit hit the fan in the GFC. I lucked out in being able to get a job again as a software engineer before I had been too many years in this situation and was still mostly presentable. I don’t take a single day of my present life for granted, I know how little separates me from those with a hand out on the street. We’re all a few spells of bad luck away from it.
- megaman22 8y agoI struggle to understand how broken your family relations could be that there's no home base that you could retreat to and start over. I come from rural New England where there is a communal network, however.I
- indemnity 8y agoThis is more common than you think.
- partycoder 8y agoSome families are small, some families lose touch from geographical distance... and you get the idea. It doesn't necessarily have to do with personal differences.
- golemiprague 8y agoHow the hell they come from the farmer example to their conclusions? If anything it shows that his cognitive ability is closely correlated to his personal level of stress. You got to leap another two steps to get to their conclusion, first that the stress is related to "poorness" and not just to the unpredictability of the farming work outcome and second, that someone who is poor all the time will have the same effect in general all the time. It might be that the farmer is stressed because of the fluctuation in his situation but if he was poor all the time he will just get used to it and it will not affect him. I was much less stressed being poor student than having to deal with the ups and downs of a business.
- whataretensors 8y ago"So take an American of average IQ: 100. Poverty, according to the estimates from the paper that triggered this post, would knock a person back to an IQ of 87, dropping them behind roughly a third of their fellow Americans of equal intelligence — just because they’re poor." Another piece aimed at guilt manipulation and scare mongering for the middle class. Don't lose your job, it will hurt your entire intelligence! Don't take risks, you'll be full flowers for algernon if everything doesn't go perfectly. There's a likely reality here that the biological impact of intelligence is high and that the market selects enough for IQ that the whole measurement goes down as some people escape poverty. Which is close to what we want btw.
- John_KZ 8y agoIf this was named "Poverty can reduce performance of a test with pretty pictures" I'd accept it. Poverty might bring down IQ scores, but it does not bring down intelligence.
- kazinator 8y agoIf lower intelligence isn't correlated with poverty, what that must mean is that intelligence doesn't help people out of poverty.