THE ORIGINAL SCIENCE OF SCARCITY
When we told an economist colleague that we were studying
scarcity, he remarked, “There is already a science of scarcity. You might have
heard of it. It’s called economics.”
Our approach to scarcity is different.
In economics, scarcity is ubiquitous. All of us have a limited
amount of money; even the richest people cannot buy everything. But we suggest
that while physical scarcity is ubiquitous, the feeling of scarcity is not.
Imagine a day at work where your calendar is sprinkled with a few meetings and
your to- do list is manageable. You spend the unscheduled time by lingering at
lunch or at a meeting or calling a colleague to catch up.
Now, imagine another day at work where your calendar is chock-
full of meetings. What little free time you have must be sunk into a project
that is overdue. In both cases time was physically scarce. You had the same
number of hours at work and you had more than enough activities to fill them.
Yet in one case you were acutely aware of scarcity, of the finiteness of time;
in the other it was a distant reality, if you felt it at all.
The feeling of
scarcity is distinct from its physical reality. Scarcity is not just a physical
constraint. It is also a mindset. When scarcity captures our attention, it
changes how we think—whether it is at the level of milliseconds, hours, or days
and weeks. By staying top of mind, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices,
how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave.
When scarcity
captures the mind, we become more attentive and efficient.
We can directly measure mental capacity or, as we call it, bandwidth.
We can measure fluid intelligence, a key resource
that affects how we process information and make decisions.
We can measure executive control, a key resource
that affects how impulsively we behave.
And we find that scarcity reduces all these components of
bandwidth— it makes us less insightful, less forward- thinking, less controlled.
And the effects are large. Being poor, for example, reduces a
person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep.
It is not that the
poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of
poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.
When we think of the poor, we naturally think of a shortage of
money. When we think of the busy, or the lonely, we think of a shortage of
time, or of friends. But our results suggest that scarcity of all varieties
also leads to a shortage of bandwidth. And because bandwidth affects all
aspects of behavior, this shortage has consequences. We saw this with Sendhil
and Shawn.
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