7 ms·

How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

100 points by saikatsg 3y ago

gmd63 3y ago
People in lower socioeconomic status are more likely to have experienced more depressing life events, dampening their brain activity in general
solardev 3y ago
This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing! I wonder if this has implications about the sense of agency people from different backgrounds feel (or not) in their lives.
- jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
  In a capitalist society, class is the predominant relationship one has with their society. I know this is pretty obvious and may not entirely answer your question, but many people find it very difficult to swallow this reality these days and I think it's worth reminding.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  To some degree, socioeconomic status likely dictates agency (the higher you are, the more agency you have in general). So, I imagine if the perceived agency is aligned with actual agency, you’d see the same. Now, in some respect everyone has the same amount of agency. No matter how rich or how poor one may be, they can tell the world to buzz off and do whatever they want to do, so in that sense they have the same agency. In reality, most people have an impulse to survive and meet those needs, like having food and so on, and people are cognizant of this fact. So unless you have the ability to provide all your needs, agency is mostly an illusion. Sure, you can do whatever you want but it’s a lot easier if you have a pile of money to cover your whims. If you don’t, well you might starve to death or die from some easily curable disease.
- santoshalper 3y ago
  Quite the opposite, people who have grown up in rewarding environments tend to be more "ambitious" (my word, not theirs) because they have been conditioned to believe that ambition is rewarded. On the other hand, people who have grown up in poverty have been conditioned to believe that excellence doesn't really matter since there are few or no rewards to be had. Keep in mind, this is well below the level of conscious thought - it's a biological response. Once you remember that humans are animals and are conditioned by their environment the same way animals are, stimulus and response, everything about our modern civilization makes total sense.
  - Viliam1234 3y ago
    This indeed. When you live in a friendly environment, whenever you do something right, you achieve some small success. When you live in an unfriendly environment, you need to get many things right at the same time, otherwise it all falls apart. So if you don't trust yourself to do everything flawlessly, there is almost no point in trying. Also, if you succeed once in the friendly environment, you get praise and more support in your efforts. If you succeed in the unfriendly environment, people assume that you either cheated or simply got lucky but it won't happen again. So even after you succeeded at some small thing, it may still feel like there is no point.
jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
[flagged]
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  OTOH, also proof that they'll keep slogging on at the same pace even if rewards are less forthcoming. Whereas higher SES people will bail or slack off. From this generalization: It's worth having some raised-low-SES people on your team as they'll be the ones you want to keep when layoffs are happening.
firtoz 3y ago
I wonder how this changes with spirituality background - e.g. with Buddhism, stoicism and so on.
- wait_a_minute 3y ago
  I think it changes significantly, since being spiritual is an effective way to rework and improve the inclinations that previous experiences have impressed upon a person. Although this study being focused on the reward response in 12-14 year olds is not going to be an assessment of that since the typical 12-14 year old doesn't even have a coherent comprehension of the basics of their spiritual text yet...
  - firtoz 3y ago
    My curiosity is from the expectation that various spiritual backgrounds (e.g. parents talking to their children about things) could allow the children to pay less importance on "worldly matters" and more on "being happy with what we have".
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      see also the anecdote of Diogenes and Alexander
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    Obviously there is a startup market for spiritual texts that are comprehensible to the typical 12-14 year old; on these lines I would propose: - Party on - Be excellent to each other (the typical 12-14 may retain a naive interpretation of "party" and "excellent", but despite that caveat they ought to have a reasonably coherent comprehension of the text!)
romaaeterna 3y ago
fMRI results show that children from lower-SES backgrounds are less stimulated by monetary rewards. "The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..." Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result? The story doesn't say, but if someone could post the relevant discussion from the journal article, I'd be interested in seeing it. I'm sure it's there.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- PeterisP 3y ago
  They obviously didn't, and didn't need to - that sentence is not making any assertion, it is suggesting a hypothesis that can be tested in future work by them or others. The sole assertion this study is making is about the existence of the effect, and it is only speculating (and not hiding that it's speculating) about a possible mechanism causing that effect. And obviously further details relating to this observation aren't already tested and published, it would take at least a few months for that to happen - if someone had already done and published a follow-up analysis, this article wouldn't be news but be outdated already.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    I agree that that sentence didn't, but further down in the article stronger claims are made, sometimes obliquely referencing prior work. So it would be interesting to see the original paper to see what they cite as supporting evidence for this hypothesis. Obviously this is something that can be controlled somewhat with the appropriate selection of subjects (there are a variety of families that have experienced generational rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags, for example). Though the N in those cases is likely to be smaller.
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      I think a problem is that this press release is mixing content from the scientific study with an interview of experts talking about it, and the colloquial assertions made in that conversation happen to have a bunch of extra speculation that isn't part of the study they discuss; for half of the press release the "standard of evidence" is like in science and for the other half it is like in this HN discussion thread, where people do rise many interesting (and possibly true) hypotheses where we don't have any evidence (yet).
baronswindle 3y ago
It wasn’t clear to me from the article itself, but for those familiar with research in this area: has anybody attempted to disentangle differences caused by genetics vs. by environment per se?
- bongripper 3y ago
  [dead]
AymanB 3y ago
This is really interesting
qprofyeh 3y ago
So put plainly, hire people who come from low income families because they appreciate rewards more, and stay hungry for longer.
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  Are you saying it'd be good to take it further... e.g. increase taxes so we have more hungry, appreciative people. Would we have better companies and economy if this was applied to corporate officers?
  - qprofyeh 3y ago
    What? No I did not. I am saying give the same opportunities to people from lesser social backgrounds. They will not disappoint.
- roughly 3y ago
  Article states the opposite - people from low income families react to rewards less than those from higher income families.
  - Avicebron 3y ago
    So theoretically then they would be more level headed employees, and might not have as strong inclination to harm others with their seeking of SES. e.g. the reward stimulus of money is lessened so the negative externality of harm is a stronger counterbalance?
  - qprofyeh 3y ago
    We read the same article. I interpret less reaction to rewards as being more appreciative. It’s deep, but hear me out. Less reaction means they (and myself included once) have the same expectation as the ones giving the reward, it being an equilibrium. Because the rewards match the expectation over a longer period of time, that’s why they (again, from personal experience) stay hungry for a longer period of time. It will take much longer for a smart poor person to really think they’ve made it to the other side permanently.
nradov 3y ago
These findings may be somewhat particular to just money. One pernicious part of growing up poor is that the moment a child gets a bit of money it is taken away. Parents might seize the money to help the family, or other friends and relatives might guilt them into a "loan". It would be interesting to see if the experiment is reproducible with other rewards that are more durable or harder to take away from the subjects.
- theshackleford 3y ago
  > One pernicious part of growing up poor is that the moment a child gets a bit of money it is taken away. A lesson I’ve not forgotten to this day. A family member set up a deal where me and my sisters had to feed three pigs for a period and look after them, the reward? The money when the little piggies were eventually sold. And so we did, and we did it well, and were excited, as we’d never had money before due to how poor we were. When the time came, our parents instead took the money, and told us they were entitled to it, and that we should be more grateful as it wa s our fault in the first place we had very little money and that we should think of this as doing our bit to pay a bit of that back. We were like…10-12. That lived with me for a very long time.
- samus 3y ago
  Money is a very interesting reward to study though because of its paramount importance in society. With money, one can do and focus on a lot of things. Without money, life is hard. Even in countries with a welfare state, as most benefits are progressively lifted as people manage to earn more money. This reinforces the effect described in the paper!
yieldcrv 3y ago
> The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment by dampening its response to rewards, which are often scarcer in low SES environments. or alternatively, many mundane things are suddenly consequential things and rewarding? and this game lacked stimulation because it was inconsequential?
gumby 3y ago
This is counter to how I would have guessed, which makes it quite interesting! To those complaining that the results are non-determinative (e.g. “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues”) that’s how science works: do some studies, make or evaluate a hypothesis, then you or others iterate on different dimensions, possibly untangling some variables or even refuting the results of such a study. It’s OK to be where it is at this stage. Of course it’s hard to incorporate that ambiguity into a regular article, especially when you are writing for the university’s publicity office, which is what “MIT News” is.
- roughly 3y ago
  Also, “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues” is a bit aside from the point: someone born into a lower SES family faces an additional challenge to achieving and maintaining success, be that learned or born. Childhood circumstances can have lifelong effects in the same way that genetics can. Now, combine that with all of the other things we do know are SES (nutrition, access to resources like tutors, lifestyle & residential stability, etc, which seem quite difficult to ascribe to genetics)…
- baronswindle 3y ago
  To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. I was asking a question.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  I likewise had the opposite intuition: low SES brains will have higher reward response to make the most out of fewer opportunities. Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. That would track nicely with the erratic, easily distractible ADHD behavior that began in my childhood. Oh well. To quote The FairlyOdd Parents: “You win some, you lose a lot!”
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  The genetics/social aspect is probably less an issue than using real money as a reward. I'm with on the process where we do experiments, and hope they can help to step forward in a direction or another. But then we're discussing an expirement that doesn't have any real exploitable results yet...which is weird, and probably on us. I still hope this doesn't get ropped into a meta analysis that takes the results at face value as one data point to correlate to other similarly flawed studies.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
luxuryballs 3y ago
did they control for nutritional availability during growth & development?
narag 3y ago
Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker, but that's not what I believe "reward" means. When guessing, you're not making any effort, it's just random, nothing to do with "agency" or behaviour. It's just a lottery and the result is just logical: in the house of the poor, happiness is short-lived.
- santoshalper 3y ago
  They intentionally chose a game of chance to eliminate motivation driven by an inherent desire to perform well at a task, isolated from the reward. Their goal was to isolate the response to the extrinsic reward (prize), vs. people who just enjoy doing well at things.
almostnormal 3y ago
A dollar is not a dollar. A dollar is something different for kids than it is for their parents. A dollar for a kid of rich patents is not the same as a dollar for a kid of poorer parents. Poorer parents likely try to keep worries about money as far from their kids as they can, even if not easy. Rich parents might casually discuss investment ideas at a common dinner. As a result a dollar may be seen much more as a reward by kids of rich parents than by kids of poor parents.
- theshackleford 3y ago
  Anecdotal obviously, but mine made no such attempt. I was reminded constantly of our financial situation and furthermore, was normally informed through various means how it was my fault for one reason or another. Yay.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    Paradoxally I think it can have the same kind of distanciation from money: it can be seen as easily disappearing and too much attachment/reliance on it hurts people. Looking at the study I also wondered why they chose something as controversial as real money.
  - almostnormal 3y ago
    Maybe acquiring a necessity is less rewarding than acquiring something pursued for fun? The point I was trying to make is that a dollar is not a neutral reward, and may cause a different response, that might otherwise be the same in all groups for something as neutral as "points". That the response to rewards differs between poor and rich in general does't seem to be testable using a reward that both groups perceive differently.
    - samus 3y ago
      Studying the different response to that reward is kinda the point of the paper though.
  - AliveShine 3y ago
cupcakecommons 3y ago
DNA isn’t all that matters, but it matters more than everything else put together.
- iinnPP 3y ago
  Perhaps today, maybe not tomorrow.
  - cupcakecommons 3y ago
    Great point! If we're lucky!
citizenpaul 3y ago
I read a quote once that said something like. "The main issue with modern psychology is that we have reams and reams of data and experiments on rich, white, college age people but nothing else. This data is the foundation of most psychology teachings." Another meaningless study of rich white people is what this sounds like. Yeah of course a bunch of rich college people have been taught to value climbing the social ladder right in front of them the few remaining rungs to the top. When you are poor and realize you have to climb a mountain first to even get to the ladder the incremental rewards are not as important as the resilience to getting knocked back down again and again.
- semanticjudo 3y ago
  Did you bother reading it? “Historically, many studies have involved the easiest people to recruit, who tend to be people who come from advantaged environments. If we don’t make efforts to recruit diverse pools of participants, we almost always end up with children and adults who come from high-income, high-education environments,” Gabrieli says. “Until recently, we did not realize that principles of brain development vary in relation to the environment in which one grows up, and there was very little evidence about the influence of SES.” Without this very type of study one could mistakenly do exactly what you’re accusing them of doing. I also didn’t see race mentioned. I’d assume the opposite of your presumption i.e. that this finding would stand regardless of race.
  - citizenpaul 3y ago
    I stopped reading at >They were told that for each correct guess, they would earn an extra dollar, and for each incorrect guess, they would lose 50 cents. Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game). Probably only second to people not considering SES even when they are studing SES. I am more interested in reading about debunked studies rather than new ones, as you can tell I have a huge general assumption that they will be poorly performed. I guess the one thing that was also left out from my comment was also that most of these experiments are carried out by college age undergrads that are rich (and still mostly white). Yeah they are "overseen" by someone with a PHD.... who depends on getting as many papers as possible published. Which is another issue. As I said I obviously have some serious bias against the validity of most "social science"
cupcakecommons 3y ago
It's all so tiresome
elzbardico 3y ago
Probably because when you are poor you learn that reward is not going to be consistent. Your parents may love you as much as possible, but they don't have the resources to consistently reward you. Your teachers might be the most caring education professionals ever, but in your poor district, there's no much they can do consistently. So, basically your brain probably says to you: Don't get over-excited with this, this is probably a one-of-thing.
- dmurray 3y ago
  But we learn in Psychology 101 that intermittent reward is actually the most motivating, and produces the best results for mice and pigeons and dogs and humans. So this theory would make the poor kids more successful.
  - kkarakk 3y ago
    intermittent reinforcement is focused on providing motivation when the person needs it - based on some intrinsic understanding of the effort's stressors - instead of rewarding the effort itself. poorer background kids tend get rewards at random intervals not intermittent intervals. this is - as a contrasting example - what pushes them to "hustle" culture instead which does reward effort and in addition has intermittent reinforcement with bigger rewards from people who are entrenched in the culture and see a performer who needs motivation.
  - Erratic6576 3y ago
    “Best” as most addictive. Intermittent reward might meant that the world and their cues are not reliable. Children are slightly more intelligent than doves, so expecting us to behave like winged rats is both reductionist and insulting
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    intermittent is not the same thing as infrequent, rare, almost non-existing.
beer_backwards 3y ago
my two cents (from personal experience): Getting money when you are from low SES is not that stimulating, because the money is inevitably spent on mundane purchases: i.e. buying a new pair of school shoes or school supplies, or beef instead of chicken for a meal that week, or fixing your car. If that money would be able to be spent on anything that the child desired, then I am sure that even a lower-SES would be more excited. I fundamentally believe that the higher-SES you are, the more agency you have (especially financial), where lower-SES are in constant survival mode. It is hard to get excited by small sums of money when you know that it will just be immediately spent on boring things.
unwise-exe 3y ago
> fMRI https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe... > “If you’re in a highly resourced environment, with many rewards available, your brain gets tuned in a certain way. If you’re in an environment in which rewards are more scarce, then your brain accommodates the environment in which you live. Instead of being overresponsive to rewards, it seems like these brains, on average, are less responsive, because probably their environment has been less consistent in the availability of rewards,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. So, "Kids aren't as excited about getting things they're not familiar with."? >"Here you got a thing" A>>"um cool I guess" B>>"oh nice I know something I can do with that!" that ^^ sort of scenario?
- hmcq6 3y ago
  No... there's an example in the article. It means that kid A's brain wont reward them as much when they complete a task that leads to rewards. Which in theory would lead to less motivation to undertake those kinds of tasks in the first place. The example in the article uses money, the kids obviously know what money is or it wouldn't be a motivator. Basically, we're training poor kids to not even try because their brains have adapted to just accept the fact that it wont get the resources it needs.
  - unwise-exe 3y ago
    I do not see how your mechanistic description actually conflicts with my description. > their brains reward them less The reward centers show lower activity. This does not have to be some inscrutable thing only noticeable with a fMRI. It could perfectly well be that they're not used to turning extra money into things they like, and so because of that don't show as much activity in the "I just got rewarded" area.
    - hmcq6 3y ago
      > So, "Kids aren't as excited about getting things they're not familiar with."? These kids are poor they're not extraterrestrials. I don't think it's fair to say poor kids aren't familiar with money. The study is on 12-14 year olds. The majority of kids buy lunch at school and even the ones on the free lunch program see their peers who splurge on 2 cookies or a soda from the vending machine or w/e. My mom was a teacher, we were on welfare but that doesn't mean I wouldn't sometimes get birthday money. I collected coins from between the sofa cushions for junk food. I did odd jobs for spending money in the summer. I knew what money was and what it was for. Arguably more than well off kids. > "oh nice I know something I can do with that!" Why is that implied to be the rich kids response and not the poor kids? I worked in my dads convenience store when I was 12 and I saved up all summer so I could buy a ps2. Why is it assumed the poor kid isn't saving for anything?

100 points by saikatsg 3y ago

People in lower socioeconomic status are more likely to have experienced more depressing life events, dampening their brain activity in general

solardev 3y ago

This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing! I wonder if this has implications about the sense of agency people from different backgrounds feel (or not) in their lives.

jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
In a capitalist society, class is the predominant relationship one has with their society. I know this is pretty obvious and may not entirely answer your question, but many people find it very difficult to swallow this reality these days and I think it's worth reminding.
Frost1x 3y ago
To some degree, socioeconomic status likely dictates agency (the higher you are, the more agency you have in general). So, I imagine if the perceived agency is aligned with actual agency, you’d see the same. Now, in some respect everyone has the same amount of agency. No matter how rich or how poor one may be, they can tell the world to buzz off and do whatever they want to do, so in that sense they have the same agency. In reality, most people have an impulse to survive and meet those needs, like having food and so on, and people are cognizant of this fact. So unless you have the ability to provide all your needs, agency is mostly an illusion. Sure, you can do whatever you want but it’s a lot easier if you have a pile of money to cover your whims. If you don’t, well you might starve to death or die from some easily curable disease.
santoshalper 3y ago
Quite the opposite, people who have grown up in rewarding environments tend to be more "ambitious" (my word, not theirs) because they have been conditioned to believe that ambition is rewarded. On the other hand, people who have grown up in poverty have been conditioned to believe that excellence doesn't really matter since there are few or no rewards to be had. Keep in mind, this is well below the level of conscious thought - it's a biological response. Once you remember that humans are animals and are conditioned by their environment the same way animals are, stimulus and response, everything about our modern civilization makes total sense.
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  This indeed. When you live in a friendly environment, whenever you do something right, you achieve some small success. When you live in an unfriendly environment, you need to get many things right at the same time, otherwise it all falls apart. So if you don't trust yourself to do everything flawlessly, there is almost no point in trying. Also, if you succeed once in the friendly environment, you get praise and more support in your efforts. If you succeed in the unfriendly environment, people assume that you either cheated or simply got lucky but it won't happen again. So even after you succeeded at some small thing, it may still feel like there is no point.

jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago

[flagged]

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
OTOH, also proof that they'll keep slogging on at the same pace even if rewards are less forthcoming. Whereas higher SES people will bail or slack off. From this generalization: It's worth having some raised-low-SES people on your team as they'll be the ones you want to keep when layoffs are happening.

firtoz 3y ago

I wonder how this changes with spirituality background - e.g. with Buddhism, stoicism and so on.

wait_a_minute 3y ago
I think it changes significantly, since being spiritual is an effective way to rework and improve the inclinations that previous experiences have impressed upon a person. Although this study being focused on the reward response in 12-14 year olds is not going to be an assessment of that since the typical 12-14 year old doesn't even have a coherent comprehension of the basics of their spiritual text yet...
- firtoz 3y ago
  My curiosity is from the expectation that various spiritual backgrounds (e.g. parents talking to their children about things) could allow the children to pay less importance on "worldly matters" and more on "being happy with what we have".
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    see also the anecdote of Diogenes and Alexander
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Obviously there is a startup market for spiritual texts that are comprehensible to the typical 12-14 year old; on these lines I would propose: - Party on - Be excellent to each other (the typical 12-14 may retain a naive interpretation of "party" and "excellent", but despite that caveat they ought to have a reasonably coherent comprehension of the text!)

romaaeterna 3y ago

fMRI results show that children from lower-SES backgrounds are less stimulated by monetary rewards. "The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..." Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result? The story doesn't say, but if someone could post the relevant discussion from the journal article, I'd be interested in seeing it. I'm sure it's there.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PeterisP 3y ago
They obviously didn't, and didn't need to - that sentence is not making any assertion, it is suggesting a hypothesis that can be tested in future work by them or others. The sole assertion this study is making is about the existence of the effect, and it is only speculating (and not hiding that it's speculating) about a possible mechanism causing that effect. And obviously further details relating to this observation aren't already tested and published, it would take at least a few months for that to happen - if someone had already done and published a follow-up analysis, this article wouldn't be news but be outdated already.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I agree that that sentence didn't, but further down in the article stronger claims are made, sometimes obliquely referencing prior work. So it would be interesting to see the original paper to see what they cite as supporting evidence for this hypothesis. Obviously this is something that can be controlled somewhat with the appropriate selection of subjects (there are a variety of families that have experienced generational rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags, for example). Though the N in those cases is likely to be smaller.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    I think a problem is that this press release is mixing content from the scientific study with an interview of experts talking about it, and the colloquial assertions made in that conversation happen to have a bunch of extra speculation that isn't part of the study they discuss; for half of the press release the "standard of evidence" is like in science and for the other half it is like in this HN discussion thread, where people do rise many interesting (and possibly true) hypotheses where we don't have any evidence (yet).

baronswindle 3y ago

It wasn’t clear to me from the article itself, but for those familiar with research in this area: has anybody attempted to disentangle differences caused by genetics vs. by environment per se?

bongripper 3y ago
[dead]

AymanB 3y ago

This is really interesting

qprofyeh 3y ago

So put plainly, hire people who come from low income families because they appreciate rewards more, and stay hungry for longer.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago
Are you saying it'd be good to take it further... e.g. increase taxes so we have more hungry, appreciative people. Would we have better companies and economy if this was applied to corporate officers?
- qprofyeh 3y ago
  What? No I did not. I am saying give the same opportunities to people from lesser social backgrounds. They will not disappoint.
roughly 3y ago
Article states the opposite - people from low income families react to rewards less than those from higher income families.
- Avicebron 3y ago
  So theoretically then they would be more level headed employees, and might not have as strong inclination to harm others with their seeking of SES. e.g. the reward stimulus of money is lessened so the negative externality of harm is a stronger counterbalance?
- qprofyeh 3y ago
  We read the same article. I interpret less reaction to rewards as being more appreciative. It’s deep, but hear me out. Less reaction means they (and myself included once) have the same expectation as the ones giving the reward, it being an equilibrium. Because the rewards match the expectation over a longer period of time, that’s why they (again, from personal experience) stay hungry for a longer period of time. It will take much longer for a smart poor person to really think they’ve made it to the other side permanently.

nradov 3y ago

These findings may be somewhat particular to just money. One pernicious part of growing up poor is that the moment a child gets a bit of money it is taken away. Parents might seize the money to help the family, or other friends and relatives might guilt them into a "loan". It would be interesting to see if the experiment is reproducible with other rewards that are more durable or harder to take away from the subjects.

theshackleford 3y ago
> One pernicious part of growing up poor is that the moment a child gets a bit of money it is taken away. A lesson I’ve not forgotten to this day. A family member set up a deal where me and my sisters had to feed three pigs for a period and look after them, the reward? The money when the little piggies were eventually sold. And so we did, and we did it well, and were excited, as we’d never had money before due to how poor we were. When the time came, our parents instead took the money, and told us they were entitled to it, and that we should be more grateful as it wa s our fault in the first place we had very little money and that we should think of this as doing our bit to pay a bit of that back. We were like…10-12. That lived with me for a very long time.
samus 3y ago
Money is a very interesting reward to study though because of its paramount importance in society. With money, one can do and focus on a lot of things. Without money, life is hard. Even in countries with a welfare state, as most benefits are progressively lifted as people manage to earn more money. This reinforces the effect described in the paper!

yieldcrv 3y ago

> The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment by dampening its response to rewards, which are often scarcer in low SES environments. or alternatively, many mundane things are suddenly consequential things and rewarding? and this game lacked stimulation because it was inconsequential?

gumby 3y ago

This is counter to how I would have guessed, which makes it quite interesting! To those complaining that the results are non-determinative (e.g. “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues”) that’s how science works: do some studies, make or evaluate a hypothesis, then you or others iterate on different dimensions, possibly untangling some variables or even refuting the results of such a study. It’s OK to be where it is at this stage. Of course it’s hard to incorporate that ambiguity into a regular article, especially when you are writing for the university’s publicity office, which is what “MIT News” is.

roughly 3y ago
Also, “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues” is a bit aside from the point: someone born into a lower SES family faces an additional challenge to achieving and maintaining success, be that learned or born. Childhood circumstances can have lifelong effects in the same way that genetics can. Now, combine that with all of the other things we do know are SES (nutrition, access to resources like tutors, lifestyle & residential stability, etc, which seem quite difficult to ascribe to genetics)…
baronswindle 3y ago
To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. I was asking a question.
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
I likewise had the opposite intuition: low SES brains will have higher reward response to make the most out of fewer opportunities. Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. That would track nicely with the erratic, easily distractible ADHD behavior that began in my childhood. Oh well. To quote The FairlyOdd Parents: “You win some, you lose a lot!”
makeitdouble 3y ago
The genetics/social aspect is probably less an issue than using real money as a reward. I'm with on the process where we do experiments, and hope they can help to step forward in a direction or another. But then we're discussing an expirement that doesn't have any real exploitable results yet...which is weird, and probably on us. I still hope this doesn't get ropped into a meta analysis that takes the results at face value as one data point to correlate to other similarly flawed studies.

deleted 3y ago

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luxuryballs 3y ago

did they control for nutritional availability during growth & development?

narag 3y ago

Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker, but that's not what I believe "reward" means. When guessing, you're not making any effort, it's just random, nothing to do with "agency" or behaviour. It's just a lottery and the result is just logical: in the house of the poor, happiness is short-lived.

santoshalper 3y ago
They intentionally chose a game of chance to eliminate motivation driven by an inherent desire to perform well at a task, isolated from the reward. Their goal was to isolate the response to the extrinsic reward (prize), vs. people who just enjoy doing well at things.

almostnormal 3y ago

A dollar is not a dollar. A dollar is something different for kids than it is for their parents. A dollar for a kid of rich patents is not the same as a dollar for a kid of poorer parents. Poorer parents likely try to keep worries about money as far from their kids as they can, even if not easy. Rich parents might casually discuss investment ideas at a common dinner. As a result a dollar may be seen much more as a reward by kids of rich parents than by kids of poor parents.

theshackleford 3y ago
Anecdotal obviously, but mine made no such attempt. I was reminded constantly of our financial situation and furthermore, was normally informed through various means how it was my fault for one reason or another. Yay.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  Paradoxally I think it can have the same kind of distanciation from money: it can be seen as easily disappearing and too much attachment/reliance on it hurts people. Looking at the study I also wondered why they chose something as controversial as real money.
- almostnormal 3y ago
  Maybe acquiring a necessity is less rewarding than acquiring something pursued for fun? The point I was trying to make is that a dollar is not a neutral reward, and may cause a different response, that might otherwise be the same in all groups for something as neutral as "points". That the response to rewards differs between poor and rich in general does't seem to be testable using a reward that both groups perceive differently.
  - samus 3y ago
    Studying the different response to that reward is kinda the point of the paper though.
- AliveShine 3y ago

cupcakecommons 3y ago

DNA isn’t all that matters, but it matters more than everything else put together.

iinnPP 3y ago
Perhaps today, maybe not tomorrow.
- cupcakecommons 3y ago
  Great point! If we're lucky!

citizenpaul 3y ago

I read a quote once that said something like. "The main issue with modern psychology is that we have reams and reams of data and experiments on rich, white, college age people but nothing else. This data is the foundation of most psychology teachings." Another meaningless study of rich white people is what this sounds like. Yeah of course a bunch of rich college people have been taught to value climbing the social ladder right in front of them the few remaining rungs to the top. When you are poor and realize you have to climb a mountain first to even get to the ladder the incremental rewards are not as important as the resilience to getting knocked back down again and again.

semanticjudo 3y ago
Did you bother reading it? “Historically, many studies have involved the easiest people to recruit, who tend to be people who come from advantaged environments. If we don’t make efforts to recruit diverse pools of participants, we almost always end up with children and adults who come from high-income, high-education environments,” Gabrieli says. “Until recently, we did not realize that principles of brain development vary in relation to the environment in which one grows up, and there was very little evidence about the influence of SES.” Without this very type of study one could mistakenly do exactly what you’re accusing them of doing. I also didn’t see race mentioned. I’d assume the opposite of your presumption i.e. that this finding would stand regardless of race.
- citizenpaul 3y ago
  I stopped reading at >They were told that for each correct guess, they would earn an extra dollar, and for each incorrect guess, they would lose 50 cents. Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game). Probably only second to people not considering SES even when they are studing SES. I am more interested in reading about debunked studies rather than new ones, as you can tell I have a huge general assumption that they will be poorly performed. I guess the one thing that was also left out from my comment was also that most of these experiments are carried out by college age undergrads that are rich (and still mostly white). Yeah they are "overseen" by someone with a PHD.... who depends on getting as many papers as possible published. Which is another issue. As I said I obviously have some serious bias against the validity of most "social science"

cupcakecommons 3y ago

It's all so tiresome

elzbardico 3y ago

Probably because when you are poor you learn that reward is not going to be consistent. Your parents may love you as much as possible, but they don't have the resources to consistently reward you. Your teachers might be the most caring education professionals ever, but in your poor district, there's no much they can do consistently. So, basically your brain probably says to you: Don't get over-excited with this, this is probably a one-of-thing.

dmurray 3y ago
But we learn in Psychology 101 that intermittent reward is actually the most motivating, and produces the best results for mice and pigeons and dogs and humans. So this theory would make the poor kids more successful.
- kkarakk 3y ago
  intermittent reinforcement is focused on providing motivation when the person needs it - based on some intrinsic understanding of the effort's stressors - instead of rewarding the effort itself. poorer background kids tend get rewards at random intervals not intermittent intervals. this is - as a contrasting example - what pushes them to "hustle" culture instead which does reward effort and in addition has intermittent reinforcement with bigger rewards from people who are entrenched in the culture and see a performer who needs motivation.
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  “Best” as most addictive. Intermittent reward might meant that the world and their cues are not reliable. Children are slightly more intelligent than doves, so expecting us to behave like winged rats is both reductionist and insulting
- deleted 3y ago
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- elzbardico 3y ago
  intermittent is not the same thing as infrequent, rare, almost non-existing.

beer_backwards 3y ago

my two cents (from personal experience): Getting money when you are from low SES is not that stimulating, because the money is inevitably spent on mundane purchases: i.e. buying a new pair of school shoes or school supplies, or beef instead of chicken for a meal that week, or fixing your car. If that money would be able to be spent on anything that the child desired, then I am sure that even a lower-SES would be more excited. I fundamentally believe that the higher-SES you are, the more agency you have (especially financial), where lower-SES are in constant survival mode. It is hard to get excited by small sums of money when you know that it will just be immediately spent on boring things.

unwise-exe 3y ago

> fMRI https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe... > “If you’re in a highly resourced environment, with many rewards available, your brain gets tuned in a certain way. If you’re in an environment in which rewards are more scarce, then your brain accommodates the environment in which you live. Instead of being overresponsive to rewards, it seems like these brains, on average, are less responsive, because probably their environment has been less consistent in the availability of rewards,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. So, "Kids aren't as excited about getting things they're not familiar with."? >"Here you got a thing" A>>"um cool I guess" B>>"oh nice I know something I can do with that!" that ^^ sort of scenario?

hmcq6 3y ago
No... there's an example in the article. It means that kid A's brain wont reward them as much when they complete a task that leads to rewards. Which in theory would lead to less motivation to undertake those kinds of tasks in the first place. The example in the article uses money, the kids obviously know what money is or it wouldn't be a motivator. Basically, we're training poor kids to not even try because their brains have adapted to just accept the fact that it wont get the resources it needs.
- unwise-exe 3y ago
  I do not see how your mechanistic description actually conflicts with my description. > their brains reward them less The reward centers show lower activity. This does not have to be some inscrutable thing only noticeable with a fMRI. It could perfectly well be that they're not used to turning extra money into things they like, and so because of that don't show as much activity in the "I just got rewarded" area.
  - hmcq6 3y ago
    > So, "Kids aren't as excited about getting things they're not familiar with."? These kids are poor they're not extraterrestrials. I don't think it's fair to say poor kids aren't familiar with money. The study is on 12-14 year olds. The majority of kids buy lunch at school and even the ones on the free lunch program see their peers who splurge on 2 cookies or a soda from the vending machine or w/e. My mom was a teacher, we were on welfare but that doesn't mean I wouldn't sometimes get birthday money. I collected coins from between the sofa cushions for junk food. I did odd jobs for spending money in the summer. I knew what money was and what it was for. Arguably more than well off kids. > "oh nice I know something I can do with that!" Why is that implied to be the rich kids response and not the poor kids? I worked in my dads convenience store when I was 12 and I saved up all summer so I could buy a ps2. Why is it assumed the poor kid isn't saving for anything?