Mind Over Money by Claudia Hammond

Author:Claudia Hammond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

10

POVERTY OF THINKING

Why being poor can reduce your IQ and lead you to make bad financial decisions, and how you won’t get a lot of sympathy from everyone else.

PERHAPS YOU FEEL envious of Mike Redd, living the high life in the south of France. Perhaps you also envy those people who became rich overnight as a result of winning the lottery. It won’t surprise you to hear that psychological tests and brain scans have shown this response is commonplace. More disturbing though is that tests and scans also reveal that we feel disgusted by poor people. Yes, not understanding, or sympathetic, but disgusted. It’s quite a finding and it shows, if such a thing needs showing, that the dice are loaded against the poor in many ways, some obvious and some very strange, but all very unfair.

DESPISING THE POOR

Why are we sometimes hostile to other people? Traditional research on prejudice suggests that the big factor is difference. That’s to say, we tend to dislike and distrust other people if they are different from us. What’s more, when it comes to other groups, we are particularly likely to notice the differences between them and us, while in our own group, it’s the similarities which stand out. Something called the stereotype content model takes this process a stage further. It argues that in order to decide on our emotional response to another person we make a two-step judgement. First, we ask ourselves whether they are friend or foe; in other words, do we consider them to be a warm character or not. Second, we judge whether or not we think of them as competent. It’s by balancing these two judgements that we settle on our feelings. So, with older, frail people, for example, we might feel they’re not very competent any more, but they’re certainly no threat, so our strongest feeling towards them is pity.

When it comes to money, many of us consider rich people to be competent, but lacking in warmth, so our prevalent feeling is one of envy. And then there are the poor. If we consider that they’re lacking in both warmth and competence, the resultant feeling is disgust. Indeed, so strong is this feeling that it can lead us to consider them as somehow less than fully human.

Now, hang on a minute, I can hear you cry. I don’t feel like this towards poor people; quite the reverse in fact. Well, maybe. And neither do I. I’m just telling you what the research has shown, as shocking as it might be.

Among the more compelling evidence are brain scans taken at Princeton University in 2006 by the neuroscientists Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske.1 They put volunteers in a scanner and showed them colour photographs of people belonging to different social groups. Some were clearly rich – for example, businessmen in fancy suits; while the appearance of others was such that they were obviously not just poor, but destitute.

When the volunteers looked at the pictures of homeless people, two-thirds were

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