The Psychology Of Being Poor - The Scarcity Effect

#TossPsychology #HumanBehaviors #psychologyexplained The month you have the least money is the month you handle it worst. You miss the payment, you forget the appointment, you buy the thing you cannot afford, and you already have the explanation ready. You are bad with money. Undisciplined. Short-sighted. When researchers actually measured it, that story inverted. Being short of money does not reveal a worse mind. It produces one, by spending a resource researchers call bandwidth, which is the mental capacity you have left over for everything else. This video shows that capacity measured in the same people twice, a few months apart, and shows you exactly where it went. Then it goes back to a world where a shortage lasted days instead of years and the exit was a person standing about thirty feet away, which is the world your narrowing attention was built for. You walk away with one shift, and it is not a budget. 🗺️ Chapters: 0:00 The month you handle it worst 0:38 The mall, the repair, the test 1:46 Bandwidth is capacity, not intelligence 2:30 Same farmer, two months, two scores 3:49 It goes into the tunnel 6:16 When asking was the normal move 8:17 Nobody thirty feet away 💡 If this helped you see something new about yourself, a like and a comment genuinely help, and subscribing brings you the next mechanism your mind is quietly running. 📚 Sources: Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao, "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function" (2013): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041 Shah, Mullainathan and Shafir, "Some Consequences of Having Too Little" (2012): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1222426 Mullainathan and Shafir, "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much", the source of bandwidth and tunneling (2013): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcit... Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society", in Stone Age Economics (1972): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origina... James Woodburn, "Egalitarian Societies", on immediate-return societies (1982): https://doi.org/10.2307/2801707 Nicolas Peterson, "Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity among Foragers" (1993): https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1993.95.4.... #psychology #anthropology #scarcity #bandwidth #tunnelvision #moneystress #financialstress #selfimprovement #humanbehavior #evolutionarypsychology #personalgrowth #cognitiveload #decisionmaking #huntergatherer #demandsharing #brainscience #socialpsychology #povertypsychology #mentalwellbeing #tossexplains