Harvard professor: long-term too tired or too poor will become silly

Harvard professor: long-term too tired or too poor will become stupid 2015-02-18 06:57:56 Source: Easy Anecdote (Beijing)Share to:1677

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An interdisciplinary team in the United States this year completed a study of the human way of thinking in resource scarcity, concluding that the poor and the overly busy have a common thinking trait: attention is disproportionately occupied by scarce resources, leading to a total decline in cognition and judgment. The study is a model of collaboration between psychologists, behavioral economics and policy researchers.

The study's lead is Mulainassen, a lifelong professor at Harvard University (Sendhilmullainathan), who won a $500,000 prize for the MacArthur Genius Award at the age of 29 for his excellent behavioral economics, and the main collaborators are Saffi of Princeton University (Eldarshafir). The results were first demonstrated at the Aspen Forum in the United States, published in the journal Science, a new book, Scarcity: Why is it so bad to have too few consequences? Published on September 3, has not yet been published in the FT's annual list of ten business books.

The study stems from Mulainassen's hatred of his own procrastination. He immigrated to the United States from India at the age of 7, and soon became a duck to the law, after graduating from Harvard, he taught economics at MIT and was rehiring as a tenured professor after the MacArthur Genius Award. Had been almost have everything, he felt the only missing is the time, there are always different plans in the head, want to divide themselves into several "multi-tasking" implementation, the result is often caught in too much promise, unable to cash in the mire.

The average person encounters this problem and will look for various time management "bible" repeated study, but "genius" Mulainassen to do the international poverty alleviation research and their own problems linked, and found him and the poor's anxiety strikingly similar. The poor lack of money, the lack of time, the inherent consistency is that even giving the poor a sum of money, giving the procrastinators some time, they will not be able to make good use of. In the absence of long-term resources (money, time, effective information), people's pursuit of these scarce resources has monopolized the attention of these people, so that they neglect the more important and valuable factors, resulting in psychological anxiety and resource management difficulties. In other words, when you are particularly poor or have no time, your intelligence and judgment will all fall, leading to further failure.

The study further explains that the long-term scarcity of resources has fostered a "scarce mind model" that leads to the loss of the effort needed to make decisions-Mulainassen calls it "bandwidth" (bandwidth). A poor person, in order to meet the needs of life, has to be careful, there is no "bandwidth" to consider investment and development matters; an overly busy man, in order to catch the deadline, has to be dragged down by what appears to be the most urgent task, without the "bandwidth" to plan for longer-term development. Even if they get rid of this scarcity, they will be entangled in this "scarce brain pattern" for a long time.

The research of Mulainassen has important revelation to the social stratum theory and the national policy, the technology development pattern and even the personal time management and so on. Here are a few examples to give

The Republican Party thinks the poor are poor because they don't work hard, and the Democrats believe that poverty stems from social inequality and that the state should preside over redistribution to support the poor. Mulainassen has proved that both parties are wrong: the poor are not not working hard, but because of the long-term poverty, the loss of intelligence and judgment to get rid of poverty, the situation is not changed, and efforts are wasted, and if simply to divide the money to the poor, the Poor's "scarce Mind model" will also lead to the inability to take advantage of these benefits So a reasonable way of social mobility should be to establish the most basic social security system, while maintaining the social competition to increase the channel, the access of resources to the whole society open, so that individuals can maintain normal thinking, with dignity to fight.

Example two: Time is not enough how to do? The traditional time management principle is the use of fragment time and multi-task, and the Mulainassen study found that not time is not enough, but the effort to judge the problem is not enough, the use of fragment time and multi-tasking solution, but because of distraction increased anxiety, resulting in the inability to concentrate on the main tasks, aggravating delays. The most important solution to this problem is to reduce multi-tasking, help outside counseling, and divide the problem, thus diluting the anxiety of dealing with the problem.

Example three: We are in the information overload every day, many people are bombarded by micro-blog information can not judge the problem, so some people began to use "Stop network" way to get rid of information overload. In fact, this is not information overload, but precisely the "effective information" lack of the consequences. In a society with serious lack of public information, once the technology brings some information open, it will cause "a hungry man eat buffet do not know how to choose" problem. Similarly, our minds are still in an age of scarce information, and there is a problem of "seeing the word as important" that it is not yet possible to deal with high concentrations of information. The best solution is not to go back to a lack of information, but to establish an auxiliary information filtering mechanism to help you pick important information. Interestingly, because it is the interaction among colleagues and colleagues, has played a certain degree of information screening role, so in China's development will slowly surpass today's Weibo.

Mulainassen's research has just begun, and his warning about "the scarcity of mind patterns" is a beacon for our information and population explosion, the time and resources that have accelerated.

(Source: Brain cavity space)

Harvard professor: long-term too tired or too poor will become silly