So, I totally buy the “cognitive load decreases intellectual performance, both in life and on IQ tests” claim. This is very well replicated, and has immediate personal implications (don’t try to remember everything, write it all down; try to minimize sources of stress in your life; try to think about as few projects at a time as possible).
I don’t think it’s valid to say “instead of A->B, it’s B->A,” or see this as a complete explanation, because the ~13 point drop is only present in times of financial stress. Take standardized school tests, and suppose that half of the minority students are under immediate financial stress (their parents just got a hefty car repair bill) and the other half aren’t (the ‘easy’ condition in the test), whereas none of the majority students are under immediate financial stress. Then we should expect the minority students to be, on average, 6.5 points lower, but what we see is the gap of 15 points.
It’s also plausible that the differentiatior between people is their reaction to stress—I know a lot of high-powered managers and engineers under significant stress at work, who lose much less than a standard deviation of their ability to make good decisions and focus on other things and so on. Some people even seem to perform better under stress, but it’s hard to separate out the difference between motivation and fluid intelligence there.
Being poor means living a life of stress, financial and social. John Scalzi attempts to explain it. John Cheese has excellent ha-ha-only-serious stuff on Cracked on the subject too.
I wasn’t meaning to put forward a study as settled science, of course; but I think it’s interesting, and that they have a pile of other studies showing similar stuff. Now it’s replication time.
Being poor means living a life of stress, financial and social.
Then why, during the experiment, did the poor participants and the rich participants have comparable scores when presented with a hypothetical easy financial challenge (a repair of $150)?
The claim the paper makes is that there are temporary challenges which lower cognitive functionality, that are easier to induce in the poor than the rich. If you expect that those challenges are more likely to occur to the poor than the rich (which seems reasonable to me), then this should explain some part of the effect- but isn’t on all the time, or the experiment wouldn’t have come out the way it did.
I wasn’t meaning to put forward a study as settled science, of course; but I think it’s interesting, and that they have a pile of other studies showing similar stuff. Now it’s replication time.
While I have my doubts about the replicability of any social science article that made it into Science, the interpretation concerns here are assuming the effect the paper saw is entirely real and at the strength they reported.
So, I totally buy the “cognitive load decreases intellectual performance, both in life and on IQ tests” claim. This is very well replicated, and has immediate personal implications (don’t try to remember everything, write it all down; try to minimize sources of stress in your life; try to think about as few projects at a time as possible).
I don’t think it’s valid to say “instead of A->B, it’s B->A,” or see this as a complete explanation, because the ~13 point drop is only present in times of financial stress. Take standardized school tests, and suppose that half of the minority students are under immediate financial stress (their parents just got a hefty car repair bill) and the other half aren’t (the ‘easy’ condition in the test), whereas none of the majority students are under immediate financial stress. Then we should expect the minority students to be, on average, 6.5 points lower, but what we see is the gap of 15 points.
It’s also plausible that the differentiatior between people is their reaction to stress—I know a lot of high-powered managers and engineers under significant stress at work, who lose much less than a standard deviation of their ability to make good decisions and focus on other things and so on. Some people even seem to perform better under stress, but it’s hard to separate out the difference between motivation and fluid intelligence there.
Being poor means living a life of stress, financial and social. John Scalzi attempts to explain it. John Cheese has excellent ha-ha-only-serious stuff on Cracked on the subject too.
I wasn’t meaning to put forward a study as settled science, of course; but I think it’s interesting, and that they have a pile of other studies showing similar stuff. Now it’s replication time.
Then why, during the experiment, did the poor participants and the rich participants have comparable scores when presented with a hypothetical easy financial challenge (a repair of $150)?
The claim the paper makes is that there are temporary challenges which lower cognitive functionality, that are easier to induce in the poor than the rich. If you expect that those challenges are more likely to occur to the poor than the rich (which seems reasonable to me), then this should explain some part of the effect- but isn’t on all the time, or the experiment wouldn’t have come out the way it did.
While I have my doubts about the replicability of any social science article that made it into Science, the interpretation concerns here are assuming the effect the paper saw is entirely real and at the strength they reported.