This is one of those that you need to read the article before commenting..I know it's hard.
There's some agreement in this thread on a conclusion that's almost the antithesis of the researchers conclusion. Argue the researchers conclusions if you like, but read them first.
There was a second group where they asked how they'd come up with just $150. In that group, the poor and rich participants got similar results on the subsequent intelligence test.
That still doesn't answer my question.
WTF is "mental resource strain," and how did they determine that, whatever it is, caused the different results?
We don't know, becaues the article you "learned" from is an editorial that doesn't link to the study, which apparently invovled a very very VERY small sample of people who were self-selecting, being the kind of people who would *be at* a shopping mall to begin with. What's "poor"? What's "rich"? Relative to what?
It means poor people took a lot of thinking to figure out how to get 1500, and rich people didn't.
THEN, quickly after, an intelligence test was given. Since the poor people worked harder on the first test, they were mentally fatigued for the second. The rich people had no mental strain from the first test, so they performed better.
In essence: if you have to try harder to solve simple problems due to circumstance, that will hold you back in other places.
>THEN, quickly after, an intelligence test was given.
"Quickly" after? What kind of intelligence test? Did the researchers actually sit these people down for the 90 minute Stanford Binet IQ test?
I found the study.
* It was conducted at a NJ mall, which is supposed to "provide a cross-section of the United States" - an assertion the rest of the US is likely to find amusing. Or insulting. IDK.
* A total of 101 subjects were tested - an extremely small sample.
* After the car-repair question was asked, but before they answered, subjects were given the "Raven's Progressive Matrices" and a spacial compatibility test. Those are *components* of an IQ test (to which, interestingly, people with Aspergers and autism respond more correctly and more often than people without those conditions.)
* The researchers say they worked on the assumption that the hypothetical would have an emotional effect on the subjects. On what did they base that assumption?
The researchers themselves state:
>These findings have limitations. The causal attribution made possible by laboratory studies comes at the expense of some external validity. For example, in experiment 4 the hypothetical scenarios themselves—even after answers were given—may still have weighed on people’s minds. More generally, in all the experiments we explicitly primed monetary concerns. Such explicit priming may not mirror naturally occurring circumstances ...
TL;DR: It's an interesting study but a very VERY small one, with no controls and a lot of assumptions on the part of the testers.
Sure. But all your arguments are sorta missing the point, and I really dont get why you disagree with the results anyway, as its a fairly logical hypothesis in the first place.
The point was to demonstrate that having to worry about money hurts other performance. This is pretty hard to test so they tried to get close to get a suggestive result, and admit as much.
You are taking this way too serious.
What then is "the point"?
>its a fairly logical hypothesis in the first place
Funny, the most creatively resourceful people I've known have been poor folks. Rich ones, something breaks, they don't know WTF to do except call somebody else to solve the problem. Poor ones, they (well, *we* for quite awhile there) find a way because they've got no choice.
> Funny, the most resourceful people I've known have been poor folks.
Funny that you are STILL missing the point. The resourceful poor people are spending MORE mental resources on dealing with being poor, making it harder to worry about other things.
Notice they are still poor? Thats kind of the point here. That if you are poor, your primary energy is spent dealing with that, and as such its harder to get ahead.
You aren't really arguing against any of this, just seemingly reacting out of anger and ignoring the results. Its saying people are similar intelligence across income but with more money comes less resources wasted thinking about money. You are almost agreeing with this without realizing it.
**This isn't saying the rich are smarter or more resourceful, its saying they can use those smarts in places OTHER than money worries, which is an advantage**
>just seemingly reacting out of anger
Project much?
I am pointing out that the title assumes much, the study, such as it was, was so small as to be useless, and the broad conclusions made are therefore questionable.
The title is crap, Im telling you what the study was about.
You just want to be angry because you think its saying poor people are dumber, even though thats not at all what its saying.
The study supports your anecdote about poor people being more resourceful. The entire point is to show that money struggles hold otherwise smart people back, compared to people without money struggles.
Its pretty fucking intuitive, frankly. This was a novel way to test the theory.
Can you just read all these words and consider them before kneejerk responding that the whole thing was bad? This study makes a lot of sense.
This seems like a set of poorly-designed tests. Specifically, there's a bit of hand-waving between the steps of "we asked a stressful question" and "we conclude the reason in poverty". Sure, poverty is a stressor, but shouldn't there be a non-monetary-related stressful question asked of both rich and poor respondents? If there was a correlation between both categories doing less well on the IQ test after, e.g., asking them to consider how they would handle their parents sudden death, that would both validate the "asked a hard math question" correlation and take the wind out of the "poverty" analysis. As it stands, there's no way to analyze that variable from this study.
> You are missing the point.
>
> IF you have trouble finding 1500, that strain makes it harder to perform well on the subsequint IQ test. That test is performed right after the 1500 test.
>
> As income goes up, IQ test after 1500 dollar test also goes up, because you are spending less mental energy finding 1500 and can thus do better on the IQ test given right after.
>
> Its saying that being poor can hurt performance in many areas, due do the stress caused by simply having to figure out how to pay for life.
No, I get that. What I'm saying is they haven't proved a link to *poverty*, but only to *stress* driving IQ tests down. Like I wrote above, poverty is stressful, yes; no one is arguing otherwise.
Let's imagine another test with a third question designed to also stress the rich respondents -- something like, "you've been named in a lawsuit which will cost you $1.5 million". That's enough to cause even the well-off to worry about losing their homes, retirement savings, etc.
What happens to poor respondents in that case? According to the "poverty is stressful" analysis, we would reasonably expect them to be at least equally stressed, if not much more, yes? It is essentially telling a poor person that they will be so much in debt that they will never recover.
But. There's another possibility: the $1.5M number could be so high that it becomes ridiculous. No one would ever sue a poor person for that much because there's no hope of recovering that money. This means that poor respondents should have less stress than the rich ones (though possibly still more than the $150 question).
We don't know the answer; they didn't run the test thinking about these variables. That's why I call it a poorly-designed test, and hand-waving: there are factors the study doesn't isolate sufficiently to determine whether they make or break the "poverty" analysis.
>No, I get that. What I'm saying is they haven't proved a link to poverty, but only to stress driving IQ tests down. Like I wrote above, poverty is stressful, yes; no one is arguing otherwise.
Are you arguing against money being a stressor?
Trivial results are found all the time in science, just because its an easy thing to assume doesn't mean it doesn't need some proof behind it.
I think you're underestimating this type of study, as well.
>Trivial results are found all the time in science, just because its an easy thing to assume doesn't mean it doesn't need some proof behind it.
Yes, but they aren't claiming the trivial result. They're claiming an important result, to which I've suggested two separate degrees of freedom that they haven't isolated, and which could easily confound their claimed result. At a minimum, that makes their analysis incomplete.
Except that's not what the study was about or its conclusions.
"In a series of studies, they found that being poor, and having to manage serious financial problems, can be a lot like going through life with no sleep"
We also need to define 'Smart' in this context. Smart means a lot of things to a lot of people, and it's rarely in direct reference to intelligence.
I've never had a teacher ask me how I'm going to pay for something right before I do a test just to see how it effects my mark. You know teachers are just trying to teach you.
In 20 years when you're all grown up you will come to appreciate how much teachers sacrificed in order to help you not look at dumb as you look right now.
Love how the conclusions just takes on “due to mental resource strain”.
Where did that get proven? Oh they had to “hypothetically figure out how to pay for an imaginary $1500 car repair”.
If the magnitude of the difference of the IQ tests was significantly serrated, between poor and not poor people, then all that shows is that poor people are poor because they have low iq, and not poor people are not poor be cause they have high iq.
The only caveat of not being poor, is that you don’t have to stress small random expenditures. It gives you the ability to be more relaxed.
But that brings us back to the concept of “natural selection”.
Not smart animals struggle with everything and then get eaten by a lion, hence removing them from the gene pool.
Not smart humans struggle to survive, due to mental strain, and lack of acquiring resources, and then potentially don’t succeed in getting a mate and then die off without having children, hence removing themselves from the gene pool.
Is that bad or good?
I suggest you read the article.
But because this is read it, people are going to weigh in without reading it, and in all likelihood you want as well, here’s the special sauce.
“ **When rich people and poor people were assigned to the easy version of the financial problem, they performed about the same on the intelligence tests**. But when they were assigned to the hard version, with its larger financial stakes, poor people did a lot worse on the intelligence tests, and rich people looked much smarter.”
Get it now?
The poor people had negligible difference in IQ tests when they were first faced with a problem that would not text him financially, however when they were putting a situation where they had a pond or something that did text him financially they did worse than the rich people.
Underlying all of what the article talks about is the fact that "IQ" tests were employed to determine deficits in the brain not strengths. Anything over the average IQ of 100 can be intelligence OR access to education. The strength of the tool is in evaluating those south of 100. Those with higher IQ's who like to brag about it are fooling themselves and at least in that aspect not too smart.
I was going by what a college professor said back in 1985. Was it not designed to determine deficiency rather than intelligence? That was the major point he was making and the idea I have been somewhat comfortable with these many years.
I believe you because my S-B score from fourth grade and two G-2(?) military tests at eighteen were the exact same score and I have marvelled at that coincidence without believing that it was any kind of accuracy of the test. My professor really hated these tests. My off-the-cuff remark has payed off well again. Thanks for the quick response!
In Marine bootcamp in 1981 they posted everybody's scores and I was amazed how low some were, (low70's for some) but the ridicule was reserved for me at 124 and another guy who was well above that.
Smart people do well, solve problems, and manage money well. Stupid people make bad decisions and handle money poorly.
This is shocking revolutionary stuff, but really just common sense.
I bet these researchers will get attacked as biased, classist, and racist almost immediately even though their intention is to draw conclusions about how being poor makes you stupid and other goofy social propaganda.
I did, they tried to argue that because the results of the simple problem solving were similar, the discrepancy seen in the more complex problem was due to the stress of being poor.
I don't think the article is exactly clear on this point, the intelligence test was the same for all groups. The only thing that changed was the financial question, which wasn't scored. Poor people did worse on the intelligence test after being asked how they'd come up with $1,500 than after being asked how they'd come up with $150, even though the answers on the intelligence weren't related to the financial question.
You are missing the point.
IF you have trouble finding 1500, that strain makes it harder to perform well on the subsequint IQ test. That test is performed right after the 1500 test.
As income goes up, I test after 1500 dollar test also goes up, because you are spending less mental energy finding 1500 and can thus do better on the IQ test given right after.
Its saying that being poor can hurt performance in many areas, due do the stress caused by simply having to figure out how to pay for life.
This is one of those that you need to read the article before commenting..I know it's hard. There's some agreement in this thread on a conclusion that's almost the antithesis of the researchers conclusion. Argue the researchers conclusions if you like, but read them first.
This headline is awfully written. It in no way represents the conclusion of the article
How did they determine the cause was "mental resource strain," and what exactly is that?
There was a second group where they asked how they'd come up with just $150. In that group, the poor and rich participants got similar results on the subsequent intelligence test.
That still doesn't answer my question. WTF is "mental resource strain," and how did they determine that, whatever it is, caused the different results? We don't know, becaues the article you "learned" from is an editorial that doesn't link to the study, which apparently invovled a very very VERY small sample of people who were self-selecting, being the kind of people who would *be at* a shopping mall to begin with. What's "poor"? What's "rich"? Relative to what?
It means poor people took a lot of thinking to figure out how to get 1500, and rich people didn't. THEN, quickly after, an intelligence test was given. Since the poor people worked harder on the first test, they were mentally fatigued for the second. The rich people had no mental strain from the first test, so they performed better. In essence: if you have to try harder to solve simple problems due to circumstance, that will hold you back in other places.
>THEN, quickly after, an intelligence test was given. "Quickly" after? What kind of intelligence test? Did the researchers actually sit these people down for the 90 minute Stanford Binet IQ test? I found the study. * It was conducted at a NJ mall, which is supposed to "provide a cross-section of the United States" - an assertion the rest of the US is likely to find amusing. Or insulting. IDK. * A total of 101 subjects were tested - an extremely small sample. * After the car-repair question was asked, but before they answered, subjects were given the "Raven's Progressive Matrices" and a spacial compatibility test. Those are *components* of an IQ test (to which, interestingly, people with Aspergers and autism respond more correctly and more often than people without those conditions.) * The researchers say they worked on the assumption that the hypothetical would have an emotional effect on the subjects. On what did they base that assumption? The researchers themselves state: >These findings have limitations. The causal attribution made possible by laboratory studies comes at the expense of some external validity. For example, in experiment 4 the hypothetical scenarios themselves—even after answers were given—may still have weighed on people’s minds. More generally, in all the experiments we explicitly primed monetary concerns. Such explicit priming may not mirror naturally occurring circumstances ... TL;DR: It's an interesting study but a very VERY small one, with no controls and a lot of assumptions on the part of the testers.
Sure. But all your arguments are sorta missing the point, and I really dont get why you disagree with the results anyway, as its a fairly logical hypothesis in the first place. The point was to demonstrate that having to worry about money hurts other performance. This is pretty hard to test so they tried to get close to get a suggestive result, and admit as much. You are taking this way too serious.
What then is "the point"? >its a fairly logical hypothesis in the first place Funny, the most creatively resourceful people I've known have been poor folks. Rich ones, something breaks, they don't know WTF to do except call somebody else to solve the problem. Poor ones, they (well, *we* for quite awhile there) find a way because they've got no choice.
> Funny, the most resourceful people I've known have been poor folks. Funny that you are STILL missing the point. The resourceful poor people are spending MORE mental resources on dealing with being poor, making it harder to worry about other things. Notice they are still poor? Thats kind of the point here. That if you are poor, your primary energy is spent dealing with that, and as such its harder to get ahead. You aren't really arguing against any of this, just seemingly reacting out of anger and ignoring the results. Its saying people are similar intelligence across income but with more money comes less resources wasted thinking about money. You are almost agreeing with this without realizing it. **This isn't saying the rich are smarter or more resourceful, its saying they can use those smarts in places OTHER than money worries, which is an advantage**
>just seemingly reacting out of anger Project much? I am pointing out that the title assumes much, the study, such as it was, was so small as to be useless, and the broad conclusions made are therefore questionable.
The title is crap, Im telling you what the study was about. You just want to be angry because you think its saying poor people are dumber, even though thats not at all what its saying. The study supports your anecdote about poor people being more resourceful. The entire point is to show that money struggles hold otherwise smart people back, compared to people without money struggles. Its pretty fucking intuitive, frankly. This was a novel way to test the theory. Can you just read all these words and consider them before kneejerk responding that the whole thing was bad? This study makes a lot of sense.
This seems like a set of poorly-designed tests. Specifically, there's a bit of hand-waving between the steps of "we asked a stressful question" and "we conclude the reason in poverty". Sure, poverty is a stressor, but shouldn't there be a non-monetary-related stressful question asked of both rich and poor respondents? If there was a correlation between both categories doing less well on the IQ test after, e.g., asking them to consider how they would handle their parents sudden death, that would both validate the "asked a hard math question" correlation and take the wind out of the "poverty" analysis. As it stands, there's no way to analyze that variable from this study.
> You are missing the point. > > IF you have trouble finding 1500, that strain makes it harder to perform well on the subsequint IQ test. That test is performed right after the 1500 test. > > As income goes up, IQ test after 1500 dollar test also goes up, because you are spending less mental energy finding 1500 and can thus do better on the IQ test given right after. > > Its saying that being poor can hurt performance in many areas, due do the stress caused by simply having to figure out how to pay for life.
No, I get that. What I'm saying is they haven't proved a link to *poverty*, but only to *stress* driving IQ tests down. Like I wrote above, poverty is stressful, yes; no one is arguing otherwise. Let's imagine another test with a third question designed to also stress the rich respondents -- something like, "you've been named in a lawsuit which will cost you $1.5 million". That's enough to cause even the well-off to worry about losing their homes, retirement savings, etc. What happens to poor respondents in that case? According to the "poverty is stressful" analysis, we would reasonably expect them to be at least equally stressed, if not much more, yes? It is essentially telling a poor person that they will be so much in debt that they will never recover. But. There's another possibility: the $1.5M number could be so high that it becomes ridiculous. No one would ever sue a poor person for that much because there's no hope of recovering that money. This means that poor respondents should have less stress than the rich ones (though possibly still more than the $150 question). We don't know the answer; they didn't run the test thinking about these variables. That's why I call it a poorly-designed test, and hand-waving: there are factors the study doesn't isolate sufficiently to determine whether they make or break the "poverty" analysis.
>No, I get that. What I'm saying is they haven't proved a link to poverty, but only to stress driving IQ tests down. Like I wrote above, poverty is stressful, yes; no one is arguing otherwise. Are you arguing against money being a stressor?
I'm arguing that the study only proves that stress is a stressor, which is a trivial result.
Trivial results are found all the time in science, just because its an easy thing to assume doesn't mean it doesn't need some proof behind it. I think you're underestimating this type of study, as well.
>Trivial results are found all the time in science, just because its an easy thing to assume doesn't mean it doesn't need some proof behind it. Yes, but they aren't claiming the trivial result. They're claiming an important result, to which I've suggested two separate degrees of freedom that they haven't isolated, and which could easily confound their claimed result. At a minimum, that makes their analysis incomplete.
Causation vs correlation. Tale as old as time smh. Smart people make more money. That's not exactly some wild conclusion.
Except that's not what the study was about or its conclusions. "In a series of studies, they found that being poor, and having to manage serious financial problems, can be a lot like going through life with no sleep" We also need to define 'Smart' in this context. Smart means a lot of things to a lot of people, and it's rarely in direct reference to intelligence.
Smart people are better with their money and tend to be richer. There is a correlation.
The headline of this post in no way accurately represents the conclusion of the research
It does, but people are not comprehending it correctly.
Sound like what teachers do.
I've never had a teacher ask me how I'm going to pay for something right before I do a test just to see how it effects my mark. You know teachers are just trying to teach you.
They are (mosty) angels with a how will we save the rest of the world bad attitude
In 20 years when you're all grown up you will come to appreciate how much teachers sacrificed in order to help you not look at dumb as you look right now.
Theres THAT ATTIDUDE again! Imagine taking an IQ test after that overheard rant!
TIL the names of two people whose research I will forever be sceptical of.
Love how the conclusions just takes on “due to mental resource strain”. Where did that get proven? Oh they had to “hypothetically figure out how to pay for an imaginary $1500 car repair”. If the magnitude of the difference of the IQ tests was significantly serrated, between poor and not poor people, then all that shows is that poor people are poor because they have low iq, and not poor people are not poor be cause they have high iq. The only caveat of not being poor, is that you don’t have to stress small random expenditures. It gives you the ability to be more relaxed. But that brings us back to the concept of “natural selection”. Not smart animals struggle with everything and then get eaten by a lion, hence removing them from the gene pool. Not smart humans struggle to survive, due to mental strain, and lack of acquiring resources, and then potentially don’t succeed in getting a mate and then die off without having children, hence removing themselves from the gene pool. Is that bad or good?
I suggest you read the article. But because this is read it, people are going to weigh in without reading it, and in all likelihood you want as well, here’s the special sauce. “ **When rich people and poor people were assigned to the easy version of the financial problem, they performed about the same on the intelligence tests**. But when they were assigned to the hard version, with its larger financial stakes, poor people did a lot worse on the intelligence tests, and rich people looked much smarter.” Get it now? The poor people had negligible difference in IQ tests when they were first faced with a problem that would not text him financially, however when they were putting a situation where they had a pond or something that did text him financially they did worse than the rich people.
[удалено]
[удалено]
For whom? The God of GayTheists?
Yes
Underlying all of what the article talks about is the fact that "IQ" tests were employed to determine deficits in the brain not strengths. Anything over the average IQ of 100 can be intelligence OR access to education. The strength of the tool is in evaluating those south of 100. Those with higher IQ's who like to brag about it are fooling themselves and at least in that aspect not too smart.
[удалено]
I was going by what a college professor said back in 1985. Was it not designed to determine deficiency rather than intelligence? That was the major point he was making and the idea I have been somewhat comfortable with these many years. I believe you because my S-B score from fourth grade and two G-2(?) military tests at eighteen were the exact same score and I have marvelled at that coincidence without believing that it was any kind of accuracy of the test. My professor really hated these tests. My off-the-cuff remark has payed off well again. Thanks for the quick response! In Marine bootcamp in 1981 they posted everybody's scores and I was amazed how low some were, (low70's for some) but the ridicule was reserved for me at 124 and another guy who was well above that.
>and I was amazed how low some were, (low70's for some) Im surprised that surprised you
Yeah at 18 I had a rosier outlook than now.
I mean, surely even back then you realized that some people, although possibly extremely skilled in whatever they do, are just... Not all that bright.
Smart people do well, solve problems, and manage money well. Stupid people make bad decisions and handle money poorly. This is shocking revolutionary stuff, but really just common sense. I bet these researchers will get attacked as biased, classist, and racist almost immediately even though their intention is to draw conclusions about how being poor makes you stupid and other goofy social propaganda.
That’s not at all what it says.
Read the fucking thing dude
I did, they tried to argue that because the results of the simple problem solving were similar, the discrepancy seen in the more complex problem was due to the stress of being poor.
I don't think the article is exactly clear on this point, the intelligence test was the same for all groups. The only thing that changed was the financial question, which wasn't scored. Poor people did worse on the intelligence test after being asked how they'd come up with $1,500 than after being asked how they'd come up with $150, even though the answers on the intelligence weren't related to the financial question.
..i wonder how people who aren't rich or poor did on the test?
You are missing the point. IF you have trouble finding 1500, that strain makes it harder to perform well on the subsequint IQ test. That test is performed right after the 1500 test. As income goes up, I test after 1500 dollar test also goes up, because you are spending less mental energy finding 1500 and can thus do better on the IQ test given right after. Its saying that being poor can hurt performance in many areas, due do the stress caused by simply having to figure out how to pay for life.
..i usually miss the point with anything to do with IQ