In this research the Principal Investigators embark on an examination of the psychology of scarcity, and its associated computational challenges and behavioral consequences and how they affect everyday decision-making. In particular, the investigation focuses on scarcity in the realms of money and time. In the case of money, this leads to the study of poverty from a different perspective than has been traditional in poverty research. Specifically, the project explores the notion that scarcity itself -- the chronic state of having scarce resources -- creates a psychological state with identifiable psychological and physiological markers, with non-trivial implications for financial, health-related, and other decision behaviors. Optimal decisions concerning health, economic well-being, and planning are more difficult for those experiencing scarcity, it is suggested, because the unique and stressful context of scarcity yields complex demands concerning tradeoffs, and produces cognitive depletion, which renders the making of good decision all the more difficult, with more severe ramifications due to the thinner buffers available in the lives of the poor.
The proposed studies explore the characteristics of tradeoff thinking shown by people under scarcity, consider some of the behavioral ramifications presumed to arise under conditions of budgeting under scarcity, and then extend the analysis from financial scarcity to scarcity in time. It is proposed that patterns observed under time scarcity, among the "time-poor," are behaviorally -- and theoretically -- similar to those observed in monetary matters amongst the money poor. The proposed studies range from laboratory explorations of money and time budgeting and depletion, to field studies of low-income people whose circumstances shift from slack to scarcity. Implications for a variety of daily tasks, ranging from the take-up of benefits to resisting temptation and adherence are explored. The proposed research explores a profoundly different vision of some of the difficulties afflicting the poor from those that are typically explored in the social and behavioral sciences -- a view of the sources and consequences of fallible decision-making under scarcity that very naturally suggests novel policy analyses and programs.
