The New Republic Daily
Report
06/06/11
Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty? Psychologists Have a Radical New Explanation. Jamie Holmes
Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory
desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does
not mean one will,” she wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The
existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free:
What would choice be without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful
and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet
cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on
impulse, even though we know we’ll need the money for other things. Everyone is
aware of such inner conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them? As it
turns out, science has recently shed light on the way our minds reconcile these
conflicts, and the result has surprising implications for the way we think about
one of society’s most intractable problems: poverty.
In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”
Continue reading "Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty? Psychologists Have a Radical New Explanation."
The Latest Jobs Numbers and the Very Real Chance of Another Great Depression Dean Baker
The GOP Presidential Contenders’ Dizzying Contortions Over Cap-and-Trade Bradford Plumer
06/06/11
Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty? Psychologists Have a Radical New Explanation. Jamie Holmes
Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory
desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does
not mean one will,” she wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The
existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free:
What would choice be without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful
and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet
cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on
impulse, even though we know we’ll need the money for other things. Everyone is
aware of such inner conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them? As it
turns out, science has recently shed light on the way our minds reconcile these
conflicts, and the result has surprising implications for the way we think about
one of society’s most intractable problems: poverty.In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”
Continue reading "Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty? Psychologists Have a Radical New Explanation."
The Latest Jobs Numbers and the Very Real Chance of Another Great Depression Dean Baker
The GOP Presidential Contenders’ Dizzying Contortions Over Cap-and-Trade Bradford Plumer
