Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Sharif Page B
Authors: Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Sharif
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quickly as nondieters when it was preceded by
PICTURE
. The
DONUT
was the problem. What is happening here is clear. It is a version of what psychologists call
proactive interference
. The mention of a donut brings it top of mind. The nondieter searches for it, finds it, and moves on. The dieter, in contrast, finds it hard to move on. Even while searching for the next word, for
CLOUD
, that donut, every bit as disruptive as a passing train, is still there, drawing attention. And it is hard to find
CLOUD
when your mind is elsewhere.
Surely you’ve experienced something similar. If not with food, then perhaps with time. You are against a tight project deadline but must attend an unrelated meeting. How much of this meeting will you process? Sitting at the meeting you try to focus, but despite your best efforts, your mind keeps wandering back to that deadline. Your body is at the meeting, but your mind is elsewhere. Like the word
DONUT
for the dieter, the deadline keeps pulling you away.
Imagine that you are surfing the web on your laptop. On a reasonably fast computer, you easily go from page to page. But imagine now that there are many other programs open in the background. You have some music playing, files downloading, and a bunch of browser windows open. Suddenly, you are crawling, not surfing, the web. These background programs are eating up processor cycles. Your browser is limping along because it has less computing power to work with.
Scarcity does something similar to our mental processor. By constantly loading the mind with other processes, it leaves less “mind”for the task at hand. This leads us to the central hypothesis of this chapter:
scarcity directly reduces bandwidth
—not a person’s inherent capacity but how much of that capacity is currently available for use.
To test this hypothesis, we need to refine our definition of
bandwidth
. We are using the term as a placeholder for several more nuanced and carefully researched psychological constructs. In effect, we are walking a fine line. As psychologists, we care about the distinctions, functional and otherwise, between the various constructs and their corresponding brain function. And
bandwidth
is a generic term that obscures those distinctions. But as social scientists interested in the effects of scarcity, we are willing to leave the fine distinctions alone, much as one might refer to
democracy
or
subatomic particles
while avoiding the many finer distinctions that these afford. By way of compromise, we will continue to use the blanket term
bandwidth
to refer to two broad and related components of mental function, which we will now explain in greater depth.
The first might be broadly referred to as
cognitive capacity
, the psychological mechanisms that underlie our ability to solve problems, retain information, engage in logical reasoning, and so on. Perhaps the most prominent in this category is fluid intelligence, the ability to think and reason abstractly and solve problems independent of any specific learning or experience. The second is
executive control,
which underlies our ability to manage our cognitive activities, including planning, attention, initiating and inhibiting actions, and controlling impulses. Much like a central processor , executive control is essential to our ability to function well. It determines our ability to focus, to shift attention, to retain things in memory, to multitask, to self-monitor. Cognitive capacity and executive control are multifaceted and rich in nuance. And scarcity affects both.
COGNITIVE CAPACITY
A central feature of cognitive capacity is fluid intelligence. To test for the impact of scarcity on people’s cognitive capacity, we use the mostprominent and universally accepted measure of fluid intelligence, the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test , named after the British psychologist John Raven, who developed the test in the 1930s. For an example, look at the following, which is similar to a typical
PICTURE
. The
DONUT
was the problem. What is happening here is clear. It is a version of what psychologists call
proactive interference
. The mention of a donut brings it top of mind. The nondieter searches for it, finds it, and moves on. The dieter, in contrast, finds it hard to move on. Even while searching for the next word, for
CLOUD
, that donut, every bit as disruptive as a passing train, is still there, drawing attention. And it is hard to find
CLOUD
when your mind is elsewhere.
Surely you’ve experienced something similar. If not with food, then perhaps with time. You are against a tight project deadline but must attend an unrelated meeting. How much of this meeting will you process? Sitting at the meeting you try to focus, but despite your best efforts, your mind keeps wandering back to that deadline. Your body is at the meeting, but your mind is elsewhere. Like the word
DONUT
for the dieter, the deadline keeps pulling you away.
Imagine that you are surfing the web on your laptop. On a reasonably fast computer, you easily go from page to page. But imagine now that there are many other programs open in the background. You have some music playing, files downloading, and a bunch of browser windows open. Suddenly, you are crawling, not surfing, the web. These background programs are eating up processor cycles. Your browser is limping along because it has less computing power to work with.
Scarcity does something similar to our mental processor. By constantly loading the mind with other processes, it leaves less “mind”for the task at hand. This leads us to the central hypothesis of this chapter:
scarcity directly reduces bandwidth
—not a person’s inherent capacity but how much of that capacity is currently available for use.
To test this hypothesis, we need to refine our definition of
bandwidth
. We are using the term as a placeholder for several more nuanced and carefully researched psychological constructs. In effect, we are walking a fine line. As psychologists, we care about the distinctions, functional and otherwise, between the various constructs and their corresponding brain function. And
bandwidth
is a generic term that obscures those distinctions. But as social scientists interested in the effects of scarcity, we are willing to leave the fine distinctions alone, much as one might refer to
democracy
or
subatomic particles
while avoiding the many finer distinctions that these afford. By way of compromise, we will continue to use the blanket term
bandwidth
to refer to two broad and related components of mental function, which we will now explain in greater depth.
The first might be broadly referred to as
cognitive capacity
, the psychological mechanisms that underlie our ability to solve problems, retain information, engage in logical reasoning, and so on. Perhaps the most prominent in this category is fluid intelligence, the ability to think and reason abstractly and solve problems independent of any specific learning or experience. The second is
executive control,
which underlies our ability to manage our cognitive activities, including planning, attention, initiating and inhibiting actions, and controlling impulses. Much like a central processor , executive control is essential to our ability to function well. It determines our ability to focus, to shift attention, to retain things in memory, to multitask, to self-monitor. Cognitive capacity and executive control are multifaceted and rich in nuance. And scarcity affects both.
COGNITIVE CAPACITY
A central feature of cognitive capacity is fluid intelligence. To test for the impact of scarcity on people’s cognitive capacity, we use the mostprominent and universally accepted measure of fluid intelligence, the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test , named after the British psychologist John Raven, who developed the test in the 1930s. For an example, look at the following, which is similar to a typical
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