Quote from luisHK:
This link should give one a better look at the study, there are a bunch of magazines who commented and published excerts of the study - which reminds me that what I read a couple of weeks ago was one of those articles, not the study itself. Can't deny the way it's presented in the link below, the study is exploited through a liberal pov.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130829145125.htm
Good sleuthing. You found the exact study.
Gist of the study is as follows:
Poverty Reduces Brainpower Needed for Navigating Other Areas of Life
The cognitive function, brainpower, and mental energy are all synonymous according to the research.
According up the article:
"Poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life, according to research based at Princeton University. As a result, people of limited means are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that may be amplified by -- and perpetuate -- their financial woes."
"A person's cognitive function is diminished by the constant and all-consuming effort of coping with the immediate effects of having little money, such as scrounging to pay bills and cut costs. Thusly, a person is left with fewer "mental resources" to focus on complicated, indirectly related matters such as education, job training and even managing their time."
The study talks about stress and says something interesting and counterintuitive:
The mental tax that poverty can put on the brain is distinct from stress, Shafir explained. Stress is a person's response to various outside pressures that -- according to studies of arousal and performance -- can actually enhance a person's functioning, he said. In the Science study, Shafir and his colleagues instead describe an immediate rather than chronic preoccupation with limited resources that can be a detriment to unrelated yet still important tasks.
"Stress itself doesn't predict that people can't perform well -- they may do better up to a point," Shafir said. "A person in poverty might be at the high part of the performance curve when it comes to a specific task and, in fact, we show that they do well on the problem at hand. But they don't have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems. It's the other tasks where they perform poorly."
The study seems to backup my hunch that poverty puts a person's brain on hyper-drive. That is probably why Hank and Gordon want to hire poor, smart, and hungry people.
Incidentally, there is something important that the study left out.
It doesn't show the effects of poverty on different races.
This was a weird study. It concludes by saying that poverty begets poverty in perpetuity so the poor can't get out of poverty.
I disagree with the conclusion.
If you are dumb then you will not have the extra mental bandwidth to escape the draining effect of poverty on the cognitive function.
But, if you are smart then you will have the extra mental bandwidth to overcome the draining effect of poverty on the cognitive function.
