Commentary: “Poverty impedes cognitive function” and “The poor's poor mental power”

Citation: Dang J, Xiao S and Dewitte S (2015) Commentary: " Poverty impedes cognitive function " and " The poor's poor mental power ". Recently, Mani et al. (2013) demonstrated the detrimental effect of poverty on cognitive tasks demanding working memory and logical thinking through a series of experimental and field studies. In the same issue, Vohs (2013) identified these findings as an instance of ego depletion, which led her to predict that the financial strain would entail self-regulatory failures such as overeating and overspending because such strain taxes the poor's limited self-regulatory resources. Understanding the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions of these remarkable findings is of crucial interest before efficient policy can be built upon them. Mani et al. (2013) attributed their findings to distraction. Due to the limitation of human working memory capacity, the poor tend to fall short of full consideration to other problems as they are preoccupied with pressing budgetary concerns. This suggests a causal, not merely correlational relationship between poverty and mental functions, such that poverty directly impedes cognitive functions because the poor could be easily distracted by monetary concerns (Mani et al., 2013). Although these authors went through great efforts to safeguard external validity of their independent variable, we contend that they paid insufficient attention to that of the dependent variable. First, the cognitive tasks they used (e.g., IQ tests, the Stroop task) are irrelevant to participants' daily life. It is possible that the poor do not have sufficient motivation to fully engage in these tasks while worrying about their financial situation. Regarding tasks highly relevant to the poor such as financial decision making, the reverse might be found. Indeed, a recent paper by some of the same authors showed that financial concerns increased selectivity of attention, away from irrelevant tasks (which IQ tests arguably are) toward relevant task (which financial decision making arguably is) (Shah et al., 2012). This is also consistent with previous studies showing that stress improves selectivity of attention to task-relevant attributes but reduces utilization of task-irrelevant attributes (Chajut and Algom, 2003). As a result of increased attention, struggling with the financial challenge may lead the poor to gradually get adapted to the enduring financial strain and eventually become proficient and efficient in the domain of financial decision making. Second, although distraction arising from monetary concerns undermines task performances that rely on working memory, it may not harm cognitive functions …