fMRI results show that children from lower-SES backgrounds are less stimulated by monetary rewards.
"The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..."
Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result? The story doesn't say, but if someone could post the relevant discussion from the journal article, I'd be interested in seeing it.
They obviously didn't, and didn't need to - that sentence is not making any assertion, it is suggesting a hypothesis that can be tested in future work by them or others. The sole assertion this study is making is about the existence of the effect, and it is only speculating (and not hiding that it's speculating) about a possible mechanism causing that effect.
And obviously further details relating to this observation aren't already tested and published, it would take at least a few months for that to happen - if someone had already done and published a follow-up analysis, this article wouldn't be news but be outdated already.
And, indeed, makes for some rather interesting follow up questions...
* Is this genuinely just a different way of processing rewards?
* Do low SES children not understand that money is a reward?
* Is there a capability gap at playing games? Or different responses to games themselves?
I don't think it makes intuitive sense that limited rewards leads to a lower response, so my guess is low SES children probably have a different relationship with money. My observation has been, in a weird but important way, that only a subset of high SES families seem to treat money as a desirable thing. Most people seem to have a what I see as a complex love-hate-contempt relationship with money. There isn't conclusive evidence in the article though.
> Do low SES children not understand that money is a reward?
Maybe they understand that the money will be soon taken away by the adults.
Either literally taken away, or simply the next time the kids need something, they will be told "now that you have money, you can buy it for yourself" (effectively taxing the income at ~ 100% rate).
> As in they're stupid? How would they not understand it's a reward.
A lot of people, if you give them a dollar they'll try to spend it on something. And that, counterintuitively, means they don't see the dollar as a reward. Someone who sees the dollar as a reward will put the dollar on their pile of dollars and then feel good because they have a dollar. The dollar, in itself, is the reward.
If someone is dirt poor, I assume they don't have a habit of seeing money as the end in itself.
"A lot of people, if you give them a dollar they'll try to spend it on something. And that, counterintuitively, means they don't see the dollar as a reward."
But the question is, how can you attribute that behavior to the poor kids only if there is no mention of it in the study or article? Undoubtably some number of both the poor and rich kids are going to want to buy something with the money. Buried in your assumption is the assumption that poor kids are less likely to try to save money or that they don't see financial stability as rewarding.
And, in my opinion, the fact that the reward center of all the kids brains lit up fundamentally contradicts your central point. The poor kids did see the money as a reward for correctly guessing the answer in the game.
I can't. That was the hidden meaning behind the "interesting follow up questions" and "There isn't conclusive evidence in the article though." parts of my original comment.
And yes, that Homer clip is exactly the sort of flow I'm thinking about. The idea obviously isn't a new one. Compare it to a similar style of scene but with Mr Burns - he'd see the money and start comically salivating or something. Homer has a 10 second delay before even realising it is a good thing, just because he doesn't see money in itself as a goal.
If the dollar bill itself is the reward, it is a worthless reward. I may as well give you a piece of paper that says "reward" on it. The dollar is a reward because it can be exchanged for something.
I agree that that sentence didn't, but further down in the article stronger claims are made, sometimes obliquely referencing prior work. So it would be interesting to see the original paper to see what they cite as supporting evidence for this hypothesis.
Obviously this is something that can be controlled somewhat with the appropriate selection of subjects (there are a variety of families that have experienced generational rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags, for example). Though the N in those cases is likely to be smaller.
I think a problem is that this press release is mixing content from the scientific study with an interview of experts talking about it, and the colloquial assertions made in that conversation happen to have a bunch of extra speculation that isn't part of the study they discuss; for half of the press release the "standard of evidence" is like in science and for the other half it is like in this HN discussion thread, where people do rise many interesting (and possibly true) hypotheses where we don't have any evidence (yet).
Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents, and that's been proven multiple times with large-scale studies of adopted twins. It wouldn't surprise me if reward response was similar.
But it's unlikely we'll make any advancements in our understanding of genes and intelligence or behavior, because this kind of research is out-of-favor and almost impossible to fund now.
Unfortunately the field of observational statistics called "psychometrics" which has "proved" this using "twin studies" is largely bunk.
The premise of those studies is linear additive effects from each causal factor, which is almost certainly false; and in general, there is no way of establishing causation without interventional experiments. If the effects were plausibly non-linear, we would need 1 trillion+ data points even to establish statistically significant differences.
These fields are all cargo-cult stats, putting data into GUIs and printing pro-forma reports. The people involved are in way over their heads, to the degree that there isnt anything to "reproduce" let alone try to reproduce the experiments: they dont have any.
The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data.
> The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data.
When and where we are born definitely has an effect on personality, irrespective of family, in most cases. Astrological star data is a proxy for the when and where, and while thus would not be causative, would often be correlative. So it makes sense to do PCA on it as you'll identify a lot of good correlations.
You are correct that star positions are proxies. The problem in the case of psychometrics is that the claim is that the stars (here: genes) arent proxies, but bonafide causes.
So in the case of astrological analysis we would, if we wished to change population personalities change, say where people were born -- in the case of psychometrics we're told that we have no control over the causes whatsoever (genes).
In the vast vast majority of observational genetic studies genes are just proxies, in the the same way the star signs are. In other cases, they're mere correlations.
In the case of IQ (and basically all social genetic studies) it is highly likely that any correlated genes are merely proxies for geographic-historical distributions of peoples over time and it was the long-time-scale geographic and historical effects (culture, education, wealth, famine, poverty, war...) that we see in attainment.
(Setting aside that IQ tests aren't valid above average IQ and have extremely bad properties both at the individual and population level for most of the measured range. )
We do know that genes are a cause of IQ (we can see this comparing our nearest non-Homo relatives. But yes, we are far away from saying which genes do cause it, much less how they cause it, and how they interact with the environment and other genes to cause it.
IQ is a test, it isnt intelligence and isnt even a measure of intelligence. It is valid only for establishing certain sorts of mental retardation in a human population.
To say that "genes cause IQ" is several levels of confusion. The claim has nothing to do with whether genes determine the physiological body structure, the claim is whether relevant aspects of human intelligence are a product of the at-birth or developmental structure -- or of that acquired from the environemnt, ie., neural plasticity / brain structure / etc.
Almost all evidence we have is that relevant aspects of human intelligence are environmental, ie., acquired. There is little evidence of the alternative because the experiments needed to establish it are large impossible or unethical. So it might be true, but we have no evidence of it.
Insofar as any claims are made about genes and IQ they amount to associating markers of geographical-historical migration (ie., breeding across time) with a very bad proxy measure of abstract reasoning which, at best, only detects deficits with any reliabiliy.
So we have proxies on top of correlations on top of terrible measures of anything with zero reliability in the range of interest. This whole thing is operating nearly at fraudulent levels of "research".
There's very very little this field can say scientifically, since there arent any experiments. It's all pseudoscientific uses of stats.
To simplify matters, suppose that we know for sure that all above-average differences in IQ are 100% environmental/acquired-during-lifetime. Now, so what do twin studies show, on this assumption?
They show that genes must be correlating with these environmental measures, and twin studies give us an 'effect size' for geographical-historical patterns of reporduction.
So twin studies, even if they were valid (and their assumption of linearity renders them invalid), do not decide the matter. You need indpednent evidence of causal mechanisms from experiments, which doesnt exist.
> IQ is a test, it isnt intelligence and isnt even a measure of intelligence.
Are you sure about that? If I find someone that we all agree is “pretty damn smart” and they regularly score 115+ and we find someone that we all agree is “not very smart at all” and they regularly score < 90. And we repeat that dozens of times, it seems like the IQ test is a measure of intelligence.
It may be imperfect, and pretty clearly does not have three significant digits of precision, but it seems it’s still a measure of the thing we’re trying to estimate, same as a set of mixed stones and a playground seesaw can provide a comparative measure of weight.
Er, sure, if you can define some objective measures of performance that are taken to be symptomatic of intelligence and correlate those with IQ test results -- and then show test-retest validity across a wide population (etc. etc.), then you'd have a case.
But all attempts to do this, i'm aware of, show in fact IQ tests don't behave this way. That all correlation with objective measures of performs, with reliable measures, end up random >100 -- and weakly non-random <100.
So what we, in fact find, is that IQ tests only reliably correlate in the 'mental retardation' region of performance.
There is, possibly, a sort of non-objective culturally feeling to the kinds of people who might do well on IQ tests. Call these personalities, "puzzler bureaucrats" it isnt clear that even for people in this population we're percing any sort of objective intelligence-related performance.
Eg., suppose we had an objective measure of intelligence based on a deep causal model of the brain and how it interacts with body/environment. Suppose we found out that a population who score 100-110 on IQ tests were vastly more intelligent than another scoring 120-130.
Now, could we find independent measures of performance to substantiate that? Yes, trivially. Take, eg., a group of CEOs and a group of maths undergrads. The former, could by supposition, have a much higher performance on a variety of objective measures.
I don't understand why you're presupposing "performance" as a measure of intelligence, and what you mean by it. No one is saying that intelligence alone (above a threshold) equates to demonstrated, or even potential, life outcomes.
then your definitions are circular, "intelligence is whatever the IQ test measures, assuming it measures anything"
this is no way to establish validity or reliability. you need an independent theory of intelligence and a variety of indepenent objective measures -- otherwise the whole enterprise is circular
Again, I wrote that I don't understand what you mean by "performance", so you can't claim a circular definition yet. In the context of intelligence or IQ the word "performance" means to me either demonstration of something (and I don't understand what you expect CEOs to be demonstrating other than attaining a particular social position), or the "performance score" of the Wechler IQ test.
> you need an independent theory of intelligence
Sure. We have some of these. Despite it's flaws and limitations I'm partial to portions of Guilford's Structure of Intellect.
> and a variety of indepenent objective measures
The various sub-tests in an IQ test are nominally independent, yes? Going back to your "CEOs", I don't see how a social position can be assumed to be objective when it is subjectively contingent on external social processes.
> Almost all evidence we have is that relevant aspects of human intelligence are environmental, ie., acquired. There is little evidence of the alternative because the experiments needed to establish it are large impossible or unethical.
The experiment raising an infant chimpanzee alongside a human infant has been done. To presuppose that human intelligent is categorically distinct from chimpanzee intelligence such that this experiment does not lend evidence to a genetic basis of variations in human intelligence is further than I would go.
I presume that some amounts of variation in intelligence, as well as IQ scores, is due to factors that are neither directly genetic nor environmental, but are more random (such as cell division and post-fertilization DNA replication and rearrangements).
> The premise of those studies is linear additive effects from each causal factor
I don't understand this. Why would you need linear additive effects to think that if identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins and half siblings are less similar than full siblings along some axis then there is probably a genetic component?
Well, I think the issue isn't the research exactly, it's the motivations behind doing the research.
Like, if it was determined tomorrow, with a huge article in nature or another journal that's suitably popular/prestigious that intelligence (and rewards for the sake of this thread) is totally inherited or even 80% inherited, what material changes would you want/expect to see in society in relation to that news.
For whatever it's worth, since you cited Plomin, if you Google him (or that study) you'll get a lot of interesting writing about how not-especially-useful that result turns out to be. A good shot/chaser on polygenetic behavior indicators is Shalizi's "g" writing, which is mostly about the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory data analysis, which seems pertinent.
Because you end up with bad science, like (potentially) the study posted here. If you refuse to consider the role of genetics, then everything is going to look like environmental impacts.
This has a real impact on policy and investment, because we waste time on money on programs that have no chance of success.
Trying to remain ignorant isn't going to help us here, even if we have good intentions.
> because we waste time on money on programs that have no chance of success.
And presumably learn from it. While wasting a lot of money and effort (and people) on programs that won't work isn't good, neither is not trying because the effect is presumed, pre hoc, to be small or non-existent.
We live in a world where most people aren't enabled to achieve their potential. Figuring out that extrinsic rewards don't work to motivate behavioral changes or achievement for some people of a certain category, regardless of why, will hopefully result in the testing of other non-extrinsic-reward interventions that may work to motivate.
While it might be easier than for regular people, it's still extremely hard for a politician/academic or political faction/academic faction to admit error. It's almost always possible to come up with a reason for why something didn't work that doesn't require giving up on a centrally important idea.
As far as I can tell, the reason why science is continually trying to prove black people inferior (let's not bury the lede) is in order to put the current condition of black people in America as a result of nature and not of hundreds of years of slavery and slave breeding, and of the current condition of black people in Africa to their inferior brains instead of the violent takeovers of their countries, mass enslavement and massacres, and the installation of friendly dictators to ship their resource wealth overseas.
Normally you look for deficits in people in order to account for them with special help, but this is a science just looking to shed blame. It's like testing for dyslexia to find kids that you shouldn't bother trying to teach to read. Or even worse, retroactively justifying your decision not to teach redheaded kids how to read by doing a survey of redheaded kids who were never taught to read, over a dozen generations, and finding them stupid.
That's the problem. The field is hopelessly tainted, and being an area that would be difficult under any circumstances (due to mass social effects rather than mass genetic effects), meaningful designs would be hard to find even if the researchers were motivated by something other than justifying the past.
In my experience, the people most obsessed with arguing and proving the usefulness of IQ are somewhere between 110-120. The people obsessed with the heritability of IQ and the supposed dominance of nature over nurture are often people who have raised terrible children.
aside: one thing I'm curious about and haven't found is that there are a number of researchers who show differences between American black achievement (slave descendants) and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean (who started arriving in 1965.) I haven't seen a lot of race science speculating about that: did slavers (either Western or the Africans who sold them) have some sort of filter that only put the stupid blacks into slavery? Were all the smart ones culled, and/or their intelligence intentionally bred out of them over generations? Did the admixture of the genetics of so many white slavers into their slave stock lower slave intelligence, or raise their propensity to violence? Or does that entire line of inquiry (or intense study of slave breeding in general) hold no interest for people trying to justify 18th century race science?
The Caribbean has a history of slavery not unlike the U.S., so the fact that Caribbean immigrants are better off is genuinely interesting. Of course, institutional factors are the most likely difference; among other things, the British got rid of slavery a generation or so before the U.S. did, and there was no real equivalent there to the U.S. Civil War and failed Reconstruction. There are also cultural differences that will of course matter, but they're causally downstream of that basic stylized fact.
> Wouldn't this only apply to research from the USA?
No. Lots of people from wealthy (and predominantly white) countries across the world have the same kinds of motivations.
To recognize that the existing structure of the world split between the haves and the have-nots is created only by human choices, not a natural state, is to admit to oneself: that one’s station in life is more luck than merit, that one is part of a fundamentally unfair system that one benefits from every day, and perhaps that one has a moral duty to fix it—or at least that the fix may require a dramatic change in one’s standard of living and habits and traditions.
For most people, who consider themselves inherently “good people”, that is a very tough pill to swallow. It is easier to look for other options, even to the point of some self-delusion.
> Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents
Note that heritability numbers are specific to a particular environment. E.g. if you have a more random environment with some kids exposed to lead poisoning, some to malnourishment and some to parasites you will get lower heritability figures.
Most studies on this are conducted in countries like Sweden and the USA on middle class populations.
This was my thought too, ofc. it's not a popular idea these days that genetics and heredity might have some bearing on success, but it does seem worthwhile looking into..
Anecdote time, I identified the reward-seeking behaviour in my peers in early childhood and didn't understand it, I felt they were acting like dogs, being overtly manipulated to do what the grownups wanted, and I felt disgusted with the idea. (I was not an easy child, but then again, I grew up to be a rather disagreeable adult)
I come from a fairly normal lower middle-class family, but was consistently rewarded, except my response to praise and reward was mostly negative, and to some degree still is. I'm pretty sure my father was the same way, he'd do stuff for their own sake and his own sake, not because someone rewarded him for it.
Unsurprisingly, taking into account how much potential I've been told I have, I'm a relatively low achiever, I'm simply not attracted to reward or winning very much, except maybe winning for its own sake, which just seems dumb.
We know for a fact that genetics has a large influence on intelligence.
We know for a fact that genetics has a large influence on personality.
.
We know for a fact that (at scale*) intelligence is the single largest influence on success.
IIRC, we're pretty sure that (at scale*) personality is the second largest influence on success.
I.e., if you measure all the possible things that might influence success and run a principal component analysis, intelligence is the first component and personality the second.
* Nepotism and such exist, but extreme cases are actually not that common.
.
It should not be controversial to acknowledge both part A and part B at the same time.
They're dumb because they're poor <-> They're poor because they're dumb.
Setting aside my moral issues with the idea of Economic Phrenology I think this is an acceptable checkpoint to stop at when trying to reason out an answer. Feel free to stop, look around stretch out your legs. And then get back on that train of thought and take it to the end. Why are they poor?
There's the circular logic argument of "well cuz they're dumb" but that ignores generational wealth, the gender wage gap, systemic inequality, luck, economics, and just a general lack of equity of opportunity.
Some people smart people choose low paying jobs because it brings them a fulfillment money cant. Some dumb people get rich off the lottery.
And like... We've all seen rich peoples kids. They're not all geniuses.
It's just not a coherent belief. It is demonstrably not true.
"Dumb" is just a projection. It takes a lot of checked boxes to become successful. Yes, one of them just may be a hereditary propensity to value reward more. It's not an incoherent belief any more than that some people could never play in NBA, it just takes another set of boxes, some of them hereditary.
I remember high school, coach organized a wrestling match played out over a week. You had 32 matches. The winners competed in 16 matches. The winners of that competed in 8 matches. Then 4 matches, then 2 matches then the final match.
When you've built an economic system that distributes wealth that way you can't cast moral aspersions on the losers. Because that's what it does, creates losers by design.
There's repechage, and there's plenty of repechage in life.
At the same time, yes life is not fair, and that's not really a property of the economic system anyone built.
This is counter to how I would have guessed, which makes it quite interesting!
To those complaining that the results are non-determinative (e.g. “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues”) that’s how science works: do some studies, make or evaluate a hypothesis, then you or others iterate on different dimensions, possibly untangling some variables or even refuting the results of such a study. It’s OK to be where it is at this stage.
Of course it’s hard to incorporate that ambiguity into a regular article, especially when you are writing for the university’s publicity office, which is what “MIT News” is.
I likewise had the opposite intuition: low SES brains will have higher reward response to make the most out of fewer opportunities. Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. That would track nicely with the erratic, easily distractible ADHD behavior that began in my childhood.
Oh well. To quote The FairlyOdd Parents: “You win some, you lose a lot!”
Also, “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues” is a bit aside from the point: someone born into a lower SES family faces an additional challenge to achieving and maintaining success, be that learned or born. Childhood circumstances can have lifelong effects in the same way that genetics can.
Now, combine that with all of the other things we do know are SES (nutrition, access to resources like tutors, lifestyle & residential stability, etc, which seem quite difficult to ascribe to genetics)…
The genetics/social aspect is probably less an issue than using real money as a reward.
I'm with on the process where we do experiments, and hope they can help to step forward in a direction or another. But then we're discussing an expirement that doesn't have any real exploitable results yet...which is weird, and probably on us.
I still hope this doesn't get ropped into a meta analysis that takes the results at face value as one data point to correlate to other similarly flawed studies.
A dollar is not a dollar. A dollar is something different for kids than it is for their parents. A dollar for a kid of rich patents is not the same as a dollar for a kid of poorer parents.
Poorer parents likely try to keep worries about money as far from their kids as they can, even if not easy. Rich parents might casually discuss investment ideas at a common dinner.
As a result a dollar may be seen much more as a reward by kids of rich parents than by kids of poor parents.
> Poorer parents likely try to keep worries about money as far from their kids as they can, even if not easy. Rich parents might casually discuss investment ideas at a common dinner
Somewhat more destructively, poor parents sometimes tell their kids money isn't important. There is an entire lower-class moral stack that regards money as sinful, which is difficult to disentangle from learned helplessness.
> do you mean christianity? Cause that's not lower-class
Attend services in upper-middle and high-income churches, and then in lower-middle and low-income churches. The messaging around money is different. Same when you hear parents teaching their kids.
i don't know. I think the lived reality of their lives is more the cause. I mean, if this study really is what it claims. You assign too much blame on people who are already unfortunate. I guess thats what sets me off.
Anecdotal obviously, but mine made no such attempt. I was reminded constantly of our financial situation and furthermore, was normally informed through various means how it was my fault for one reason or another. Yay.
Paradoxally I think it can have the same kind of distanciation from money: it can be seen as easily disappearing and too much attachment/reliance on it hurts people.
Looking at the study I also wondered why they chose something as controversial as real money.
Maybe acquiring a necessity is less rewarding than acquiring something pursued for fun? The point I was trying to make is that a dollar is not a neutral reward, and may cause a different response, that might otherwise be the same in all groups for something as neutral as "points".
That the response to rewards differs between poor and rich in general does't seem to be testable using a reward that both groups perceive differently.
The words "this is all you fault and we wish we never had you" and similar phrases and discussions, often including wishes they had followed through with abortions were used often and frequently. And this was not general, this was out and out "you are the reason we don't have money/can't do nice things/cant afford a mortgage" etc were levied at me again and again, over and over. For a significant chunk of my childhood my parents laid all faults in their life directly at my feet, to my face, when I had barely the capacity to understand the world around me let alone counter with any kind of argument.
I was eventually removed from my parents through the assistance of the courts and my grandparents who were witness to the significant mental and physical abuse I suffered at the hand of my parents. They had to spend the remainder of my youth/teens attempting to reverse the idea I had gained that everything that occurred in life of a negative nature must be inherently my fault, and the behavioural issues I had picked up resulting from that. By explaining that adults make choices, choices I cant be held responsible for when I had yet to even be born, etc etc. How successful they were is debatable because even into adulthood I've a tendency to assign blame/accept blame when it is apparently unwarranted according to those around me over the last couple of decades.
Aka my first assumption is always "this must be my fault in some way." even if I can not see an immediate manner in which that could possibly be true.
For context; my parents were actually poor because my mother never finished school, fell pregnant with me at 15, made poor life choices and her and my stepfather pissed most of their money away on cannabis for the duration of the time I was raised by them. Cannabis first, everything else later, if at all.
These findings may be somewhat particular to just money. One pernicious part of growing up poor is that the moment a child gets a bit of money it is taken away. Parents might seize the money to help the family, or other friends and relatives might guilt them into a "loan". It would be interesting to see if the experiment is reproducible with other rewards that are more durable or harder to take away from the subjects.
> One pernicious part of growing up poor is that the moment a child gets a bit of money it is taken away.
A lesson I’ve not forgotten to this day. A family member set up a deal where me and my sisters had to feed three pigs for a period and look after them, the reward? The money when the little piggies were eventually sold.
And so we did, and we did it well, and were excited, as we’d never had money before due to how poor we were.
When the time came, our parents instead took the money, and told us they were entitled to it, and that we should be more grateful as it wa s our fault in the first place we had very little money and that we should think of this as doing our bit to pay a bit of that back. We were like…10-12.
Money is a very interesting reward to study though because of its paramount importance in society. With money, one can do and focus on a lot of things. Without money, life is hard. Even in countries with a welfare state, as most benefits are progressively lifted as people manage to earn more money. This reinforces the effect described in the paper!
Probably because when you are poor you learn that reward is not going to be consistent. Your parents may love you as much as possible, but they don't have the resources to consistently reward you.
Your teachers might be the most caring education professionals ever, but in your poor district, there's no much they can do consistently.
So, basically your brain probably says to you: Don't get over-excited with this, this is probably a one-of-thing.
But we learn in Psychology 101 that intermittent reward is actually the most motivating, and produces the best results for mice and pigeons and dogs and humans. So this theory would make the poor kids more successful.
intermittent reinforcement is focused on providing motivation when the person needs it - based on some intrinsic understanding of the effort's stressors - instead of rewarding the effort itself.
poorer background kids tend get rewards at random intervals not intermittent intervals.
this is - as a contrasting example - what pushes them to "hustle" culture instead which does reward effort and in addition has intermittent reinforcement with bigger rewards from people who are entrenched in the culture and see a performer who needs motivation.
my two cents (from personal experience): Getting money when you are from low SES is not that stimulating, because the money is inevitably spent on mundane purchases: i.e. buying a new pair of school shoes or school supplies, or beef instead of chicken for a meal that week, or fixing your car.
If that money would be able to be spent on anything that the child desired, then I am sure that even a lower-SES would be more excited.
I fundamentally believe that the higher-SES you are, the more agency you have (especially financial), where lower-SES are in constant survival mode. It is hard to get excited by small sums of money when you know that it will just be immediately spent on boring things.
> “If you’re in a highly resourced environment, with many rewards available, your brain gets tuned in a certain way. If you’re in an environment in which rewards are more scarce, then your brain accommodates the environment in which you live. Instead of being overresponsive to rewards, it seems like these brains, on average, are less responsive, because probably their environment has been less consistent in the availability of rewards,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
So, "Kids aren't as excited about getting things they're not familiar with."?
It means that kid A's brain wont reward them as much when they complete a task that leads to rewards. Which in theory would lead to less motivation to undertake those kinds of tasks in the first place. The example in the article uses money, the kids obviously know what money is or it wouldn't be a motivator.
Basically, we're training poor kids to not even try because their brains have adapted to just accept the fact that it wont get the resources it needs.
I do not see how your mechanistic description actually conflicts with my description.
> their brains reward them less
The reward centers show lower activity. This does not have to be some inscrutable thing only noticeable with a fMRI. It could perfectly well be that they're not used to turning extra money into things they like, and so because of that don't show as much activity in the "I just got rewarded" area.
> So, "Kids aren't as excited about getting things they're not familiar with."?
These kids are poor they're not extraterrestrials.
I don't think it's fair to say poor kids aren't familiar with money. The study is on 12-14 year olds. The majority of kids buy lunch at school and even the ones on the free lunch program see their peers who splurge on 2 cookies or a soda from the vending machine or w/e.
My mom was a teacher, we were on welfare but that doesn't mean I wouldn't sometimes get birthday money. I collected coins from between the sofa cushions for junk food. I did odd jobs for spending money in the summer. I knew what money was and what it was for. Arguably more than well off kids.
> "oh nice I know something I can do with that!"
Why is that implied to be the rich kids response and not the poor kids? I worked in my dads convenience store when I was 12 and I saved up all summer so I could buy a ps2. Why is it assumed the poor kid isn't saving for anything?
It wasn’t clear to me from the article itself, but for those familiar with research in this area: has anybody attempted to disentangle differences caused by genetics vs. by environment per se?
Quite the opposite, people who have grown up in rewarding environments tend to be more "ambitious" (my word, not theirs) because they have been conditioned to believe that ambition is rewarded.
On the other hand, people who have grown up in poverty have been conditioned to believe that excellence doesn't really matter since there are few or no rewards to be had. Keep in mind, this is well below the level of conscious thought - it's a biological response.
Once you remember that humans are animals and are conditioned by their environment the same way animals are, stimulus and response, everything about our modern civilization makes total sense.
This indeed. When you live in a friendly environment, whenever you do something right, you achieve some small success. When you live in an unfriendly environment, you need to get many things right at the same time, otherwise it all falls apart. So if you don't trust yourself to do everything flawlessly, there is almost no point in trying.
Also, if you succeed once in the friendly environment, you get praise and more support in your efforts. If you succeed in the unfriendly environment, people assume that you either cheated or simply got lucky but it won't happen again. So even after you succeeded at some small thing, it may still feel like there is no point.
To some degree, socioeconomic status likely dictates agency (the higher you are, the more agency you have in general). So, I imagine if the perceived agency is aligned with actual agency, you’d see the same.
Now, in some respect everyone has the same amount of agency. No matter how rich or how poor one may be, they can tell the world to buzz off and do whatever they want to do, so in that sense they have the same agency. In reality, most people have an impulse to survive and meet those needs, like having food and so on, and people are cognizant of this fact. So unless you have the ability to provide all your needs, agency is mostly an illusion. Sure, you can do whatever you want but it’s a lot easier if you have a pile of money to cover your whims. If you don’t, well you might starve to death or die from some easily curable disease.
In a capitalist society, class is the predominant relationship one has with their society.
I know this is pretty obvious and may not entirely answer your question, but many people find it very difficult to swallow this reality these days and I think it's worth reminding.
Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker, but that's not what I believe "reward" means.
When guessing, you're not making any effort, it's just random, nothing to do with "agency" or behaviour. It's just a lottery and the result is just logical: in the house of the poor, happiness is short-lived.
They intentionally chose a game of chance to eliminate motivation driven by an inherent desire to perform well at a task, isolated from the reward. Their goal was to isolate the response to the extrinsic reward (prize), vs. people who just enjoy doing well at things.
> The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment by dampening its response to rewards, which are often scarcer in low SES environments.
or alternatively, many mundane things are suddenly consequential things and rewarding? and this game lacked stimulation because it was inconsequential?
I think it changes significantly, since being spiritual is an effective way to rework and improve the inclinations that previous experiences have impressed upon a person. Although this study being focused on the reward response in 12-14 year olds is not going to be an assessment of that since the typical 12-14 year old doesn't even have a coherent comprehension of the basics of their spiritual text yet...
Obviously there is a startup market for spiritual texts that are comprehensible to the typical 12-14 year old; on these lines I would propose:
- Party on
- Be excellent to each other
(the typical 12-14 may retain a naive interpretation of "party" and "excellent", but despite that caveat they ought to have a reasonably coherent comprehension of the text!)
My curiosity is from the expectation that various spiritual backgrounds (e.g. parents talking to their children about things) could allow the children to pay less importance on "worldly matters" and more on "being happy with what we have".
OTOH, also proof that they'll keep slogging on at the same pace even if rewards are less forthcoming. Whereas higher SES people will bail or slack off.
From this generalization: It's worth having some raised-low-SES people on your team as they'll be the ones you want to keep when layoffs are happening.
"The main issue with modern psychology is that we have reams and reams of data and experiments on rich, white, college age people but nothing else. This data is the foundation of most psychology teachings."
Another meaningless study of rich white people is what this sounds like. Yeah of course a bunch of rich college people have been taught to value climbing the social ladder right in front of them the few remaining rungs to the top. When you are poor and realize you have to climb a mountain first to even get to the ladder the incremental rewards are not as important as the resilience to getting knocked back down again and again.
“Historically, many studies have involved the easiest people to recruit, who tend to be people who come from advantaged environments. If we don’t make efforts to recruit diverse pools of participants, we almost always end up with children and adults who come from high-income, high-education environments,” Gabrieli says. “Until recently, we did not realize that principles of brain development vary in relation to the environment in which one grows up, and there was very little evidence about the influence of SES.”
Without this very type of study one could mistakenly do exactly what you’re accusing them of doing. I also didn’t see race mentioned. I’d assume the opposite of your presumption i.e. that this finding would stand regardless of race.
>They were told that for each correct guess, they would earn an extra dollar, and for each incorrect guess, they would lose 50 cents.
Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game). Probably only second to people not considering SES even when they are studing SES.
I am more interested in reading about debunked studies rather than new ones, as you can tell I have a huge general assumption that they will be poorly performed.
I guess the one thing that was also left out from my comment was also that most of these experiments are carried out by college age undergrads that are rich (and still mostly white).
Yeah they are "overseen" by someone with a PHD.... who depends on getting as many papers as possible published. Which is another issue. As I said I obviously have some serious bias against the validity of most "social science"
> Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game).
Do you have one or two references for this I could take a look at?
I'm as wary of bias and mistakes in research as "the next person" but if they are measuring brain activity it gets more interesting. To establish that there isn't some validity to this experiment then one would have to show that the brain's reward center can respond while receiving a reward while playing a game but not respond when receiving a reward in a different "non-game" context.
If such research exists or it's been established as fact that this is true, that would seem like a glaring omission from this study. I'd be interested to see that.
Secondarily, you avoided addressing the race question entirely :) I'll assume it is safe to say there is some bias there as well then.
That is probably correct. I wasn't specifically dunking on this study about the race component. Its just a huge issue with this field in general. Also(My take) the race doesn't have so much to do with it as the typical culture from what we classify as race but since culture type is not ever tracked anywhere "race" is all we have to go on. There by my take could be someone that is "black/asian/indian/whatever" but raised in "white" culture and would count from a psychology experiment standpoint as white.
Sorry I don't have them, too much cruft online to find them. Mostly as debunks to other experiments where when real stakes are used the experiment could not be replicated. You may be able to find them searching "replication crisis" as one of your keywords but I don't have time to dig them up right now. its just a fringe minor interest of mine.
On a side note: Have you ever participated in any of these? I have and I've seen participants actively undermine the spirit of the experiment while in the experiment, making side bets and such. Usually there is some sort of cap on what you can get 5-20$ or something and people there are basically saying the few bucks was just for beer money or whatever so they are willing to risk it to make a "Pot" out of the money and one person can have a nice day from it. Again since most of the people available for these experiments (despite what TV portrays) are not really hard up for the few bucks from the couple hours they spend participating. (based on my real world experiences)
Could that have been part of the experiments? Maybe. Maybe for some of them, but not all the ones I've seen for sure. And they used that data to "prove" something...
So theoretically then they would be more level headed employees, and might not have as strong inclination to harm others with their seeking of SES. e.g. the reward stimulus of money is lessened so the negative externality of harm is a stronger counterbalance?
We read the same article. I interpret less reaction to rewards as being more appreciative. It’s deep, but hear me out. Less reaction means they (and myself included once) have the same expectation as the ones giving the reward, it being an equilibrium. Because the rewards match the expectation over a longer period of time, that’s why they (again, from personal experience) stay hungry for a longer period of time. It will take much longer for a smart poor person to really think they’ve made it to the other side permanently.
Are you saying it'd be good to take it further... e.g. increase taxes so we have more hungry, appreciative people. Would we have better companies and economy if this was applied to corporate officers?
"The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..."
Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result? The story doesn't say, but if someone could post the relevant discussion from the journal article, I'd be interested in seeing it.
I'm sure it's there.