— People who are worried about having enough money to pay their bills had a temporary decrease in their IQ when given an intelligence test, researchers at Princeton University have found.
This study, however, wasn’t conducted in a quiet room on campus. The researchers got permission from Quaker Bridge Mall in Lawrence, which attracts shoppers of varying income levels and backgrounds, to interview willing participants.
“After OKing it with the mall, our graduate students approached random people to participate in the study, and they were asked about their household incomes,” said study co-author Eldar Shafir, a Princeton University psychology professor. “The questionnaire took about 20 minutes to complete, and the study gave a nice realistic sample of American lives. It was a wonderful way to collect data from real folks with real lives.”
The study surveyed more than 400 shoppers in a series of four sessions at the mall between 2010 and 2012. Willing shoppers filled out questionnaires relating to mental energy and financial scenarios to determine if the two are related.
The study found that financial stress monopolizes thinking, making other calculations slower and more difficult. This money-and-brain crunch applies, albeit to a smaller degree, to about 100 million Americans who face financial squeezes, said the team of economists and psychologists who wrote the study published in the journal Science.
The study used tests that examined various aspects of thinking, including a traditional IQ test, said study co-author Jiaying Zhao, a professor of psychology and sustainability at the University of British Columbia.
The shoppers were presented with scenarios that involved a large and a small car repair bill, Shafir said. Those with family incomes of about $20,000 scored about the same as those with $70,000 incomes on IQ tests when the car bill was small.
But when poorer people had to think about facing a whopping repair bill, their IQ scores were 40 percent lower.
“Bigger financial burdens took away from some people’s ability to perform well,” Shafir said. “The results were so interesting.”
“Our paper isn’t about poverty. It’s about people struggling to make ends meet,” said Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard economist and study co-author. “When we think about people who are financially stressed, we think they are short on money, but the truth is they are also short on cognitive capacity.”
After surveying the mall shoppers, researchers then looked at life in the fields of India, where farmers only get paid once a year. Before the harvest, they take out loans and pawn goods. After they sell their harvest, they are flush with cash.
Mullainathan and colleagues tested the same 464 farmers before and after the harvest, and their IQ scores improved by 25 percent when their wallets fattened.
“It’s a very powerful effect,” Shafir said. “When you are dealing with budgetary finances, it does intrude on your thinking. It’s at the top of your mind.”
Education differences can’t be a major factor because the poor only scored worse when they were faced with big bills, Shafir said. The more educated rich may have learned to divide their attention, but that wouldn’t be a significant factor, he said.
The study’s authors and others say the results contradict long-standing economic, social and political theories that say individuals — not outside influences — are the primary problem with poverty.
“For a long time we’ve been blaming the poor for their own failings,” Zhao said. “We’re arguing something very different.”
Though she was not part of the study, Harvard poverty researcher Kathryn Edin said the research “is a big deal that solves a critical puzzle in poverty research.”
She said poor people often have the same mainstream values about marriage and two-parent families as everyone else, but they don't seem to act that way. This shows that it's not their values but the situation that impairs their decision-making, she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Contact Nicole Mulvaney at nmulvaney@njtimes.com.
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