THE STRESS OF POVERTY MAKES YOU LESS CAPABLE OF DEALING WITH IT

PLANET SAVE : HOW POVERTY IMPAIRS MENTAL FUNCTIONING reported by Michael Ricciardo

Some excerpts from this interesting article...

But new research by a team of psychologists and economists from Harvard, Princeton, and the University of British Columbia, has found that it is not simply the lack of money that forces  poor people to make “poor” decisions, rather, that poverty itself depletes cognitive resources, and specifically, one resource in particular: cognitive control...

...Poor people, due to their lack of financial resources, tend to face more of such trade-offs, more frequently, with each such trade-off or sacrifice further depleting his or her capacity for self-control. Put simply: the more people have to exercise self-control, the worse they become at exercising self-control. Interestingly, this behavior is similar to those experiencing chronic pain...

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In the words of the authors: “The findings are not about poor people…but about any people who find themselves