Why Poverty Causes Bad Decisions

Poverty is neither genetically transmitted nor a cosmic destiny imposed on people, regions, or countries.

Photo by @jakemelara on unsplash.com

We have long known that traditional strategies to combat social exclusion, however well-intentioned, do not offer long-lasting results, nor do they tend to have significant reach. Therefore, attention should be paid to those contributions capable of suggesting other approaches.

Beyond the obvious difficulties of overcoming a status quo based on long-standing political and economic relations between countries, recent research provides a revealing new perspective:

Poverty feeds itself. The psychological burden of living in a context of scarcity affects the human brain, producing a cognitive deterioration that translates into worse life decisions and, consequently, the perpetuation of the state of poverty.

Dave Nussbaum, in his social psychology blog Random Assignment, summarizes perfectly the essence of this study: