The economic condition
of many parts of the world is currently looking worse than a few years ago.
Thus many people are feeling poorer these days even if by standards of the
developing and under-developed world, they are living comfortably.
This
leads to an interesting question of behavior about how we respond to financial
opportunities when we may be thinking about poverty, that is does our mood
control our financial decisions or are we the creatures of cold financial logic
that we would like to claim to be? Lei Lui et
al have popped that question to groups of undergraduates and reported out
in this week’s PLoS one (1).
The
main experiment was to show groups either lots pictures of extreme poverty or
luxurious affluence. They then played a
game with them – psychologists do like playing games. In this game each
individual was given a choice of accepting a small amount of cash right away or
waiting 3 days to receive more. They had to do this 64 times and were given the
information that one of their choices would be randomly chosen to happen at the
end of the game.
The
results showed that those exposed to pictures of poverty were more likely to go
for immediate gratification than wait to get richer.
Another
two groups were exposed to the lottery of life by being given a basic payment
and then drawing a card that would either give them a fat bonus or
nothing. They were all aware of what
other people were getting. Again, those who were in the no bonus group were
more likely to go for the ‘jam today, rather than jam tomorrow’ in the
post-game testing.
This
leaves me a little concerned as we have an election looming where the financial
choices appear to be tax cuts for all us wannabe rich guys or a longer term
rebuilding of a prosperous society. Our desire for instant gratification is
likely to bite most of us in the backside as we won’t get past the wannabe
stage to become an actual rich person.
