How do you improve your life? Many of us assume that flourishing in the
face of adversity requires a certain kind of mindset. Believing in
your power, staying focused on future goals, being proactive, and leveraging
social relationships are four outlooks that can help, many of us suspect, in
overcoming life’s obstacles. Driven by the belief that people can change their
lives by thinking differently, public organisations in the UK and the US have
made a deliberate effort over the past decade to develop such a mindset among
people experiencing the most persistent forms of adversity in advanced
democracies: those who live on little or no income. Yet such efforts have been
largely unsuccessful at reducing poverty and unemployment, and have been
derided both by the people they were designed to help and by those advocating
on their behalf. What has gone wrong here?
Many explanations
have emerged from those studying poverty, with each account more nuanced and
humanistic than the last. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, it was argued that people
caught in intergenerational poverty traps were morally deficient: they did not
want to work hard to advance in society and would rather depend on the state
for financial support, revealing a ‘culture of poverty’ that needed to be
disrupted. In subsequent decades, efforts to encourage people to create a
better life for themselves were focused on education and financial literacy:
those lower in socioeconomic status could be taught which decisions were
beneficial in the long run (such as giving up smoking and avoiding costly
loans) and how to develop the self-belief and self-control needed to stick to
them. More recently, research has focused on the psychological costs of poverty
itself: thinking daily about financial worries eats up cognitive
‘bandwidth’, leaving little mental space for someone to figure out
how to advance their long-term goals – let alone stick to them. That’s why the
latest set of interventions focus either on nudging poor people toward more
acceptable behaviours, such as preparing healthier meals and saving money, or
training them in cognitive skills that enable them to do these things more
regularly.
Despite decades of
explanations and interventions, these efforts have fallen short in one
important way: what I call the assumption of free-floating mindsets. This
assumption is not only held by researchers but also policymakers and charity
workers engaged in well-meaning efforts to tackle poverty in rich countries
specifically by focusing on the psychology of those who are low in
socioeconomic status. It runs like this: everyone has the power to decide how
to perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and challenges they
face. How did such a belief become commonplace? The assumption arises from
evidence that some perceptions and responses are more helpful than others, and
these have earned specific names in psychology: believing in one’s own power
reflects what researchers call an internal ‘locus of control’; sticking to
long-term plans engages ‘self-regulation’; being positively proactive in moving
toward one’s goals is called ‘approach orientation’; and leveraging
relationships involves the development of ‘general social trust’ and
‘agreeableness’. Research teaches us that these are associated with better psychological
functioning, higher incomes,
and longer lives.
When combined, these orientations appear to converge into
a mindset that can lead to human flourishing.
There’s one
problem: mindsets are not free-floating. They are neither optional strategies
that everyone can freely adopt nor value-neutral ways of enhancing wellbeing.
Instead, they are embedded in life conditions that have material, social and
ideological dimensions, and this is just as true for those of us living in
poverty as it is for the rest of us living in financial comfort.
As a social
psychologist, I study how contexts shape the way we think, such that what
appears to be a free-floating mindset is actually the product of societal
forces working in subtle ways. I do this, first, by viewing decision-making
under financial strain as an adaptive response to environmental needs, and,
second, by examining the ideological origins of the middle-class mindsets these
decisions are supposed to emulate.
The
first strand involves understanding how
behaviour is a response to ecological cues: how does a person with a set of
fundamental needs navigate an environment filled with threats, opportunities
and constraints? For those who are poor or living on a very low income, one of
the most salient aspects of one’s environment is scarcity: simply not having
enough money to meet one’s daily needs. In addition to being materially scarce,
resources can also be unstable over time: income one week is not predictive of
earnings the following week. Scarcity and instability are common even in rich
countries with developed welfare states, such as the UK, where home evictions
and the use of food banks accompany the increasing precarity
of welfare benefits and low-wage work.
Imagine for a
moment what scarcity and instability might feel like at the bottom of the
socioeconomic ladder. You are constantly uncertain whether you will earn enough
money (will your employer give you the hours you need this week?), while trying
to avoid unexpected financial demands (will your child need a new school
uniform, or will your car need repairs?). If you’re unable to pay rent, your
family loses their home. When I have simulated a mild version of this experience for
middle-class people – using a household budgeting game on a computer where
they’re randomly assigned to be poor or financially comfortable – participants
have found it to be profoundly disempowering. Those assigned to be poor
reported a lower sense of power, and outlooks assumed to be the product of a
freely chosen mindset (self-efficacy and locus of control) were diminished by
the mere momentary lived experience of trying to meet one’s needs when one does
not have enough.
I don’t think this
is a sign of faulty psychological processing, or a mental disruption triggered
by stress or cognitive load. It is a rational recalibration of a person’s sense
of what their behaviour can actually achieve in response to ecological cues
implying that there are bigger forces at play. A person’s locus of control can
be seen as a barometer of their life conditions. It carries information about
their relative influence on the world, which feeds into the battle of competing
priorities that shapes daily decision-making. Think of the decision to stop
smoking as an example. If your job exposes you to health risks (perhaps from
shift work or toxins), or your attempts to find a new job yield little reward
despite huge effort, or you start to notice that most people in your
neighbourhood experience ill health as they age and die relatively young, why
would you focus on giving up cigarettes? The potential future payoff from
stopping smoking is simply not as great as the relief it gives from the chronic
stress of your everyday life. When studied experimentally, the tendency to
prioritise rewards in the future rather than the present diminishes among those who feel low in power or perceive instability or uncertainty in their
environment. The apparent failure of self-regulation – a trait admired in those
who have it, and taught to those who don’t – is not a psychological impairment,
but an adaptive response to having little actual control over one’s future.
So
far, we have seen how locus of control and
self-regulation (orientations that emerge from contexts of privilege) make
little sense to those living in precarious material circumstances. To make it
easier for people to adopt a mindset that unlocks flourishing, we should first
ensure that their needs are met in a stable way, so they experience real
control over their life circumstances and have a future that is worth investing
in.
To explore the
psychological impact of poverty even further, we can move from considering the
material conditions of someone’s life to examining their social conditions.
Living on a low income often means living in a low-income neighbourhood in
which your family is just one of many dealing with financial struggles. Such
shared experiences are often described in terms of the potential they offer for
community solidarity, in which neighbours help each other out because they are
each aware of what the other is facing. But there are limits to what friends
and family can do if they themselves are struggling to put food on the table.
And where deprivation is rife, so is desperation, which can lead neighbours to
feel they are competing for the resources needed to make ends meet.
Going beyond the
neighbourhood, being poor in a rich country means that every encounter with
those living in financial comfort, and every point of interaction with the
welfare system, makes you even more conscious of your low socioeconomic
standing. Simply having a positive attitude won’t get you far when you combine
the stress of scarcity and instability with the isolation of feeling that you and
your community have been left behind by the rest of society. Evidence shows that being placed in a situation of low relative
earnings decreases happiness, and feeling low in power decreases approach orientation (the tendency of
proactively aligning with your goals). A person in this situation is not
mindlessly pessimistic and blind to opportunities to fulfil their aspirations;
they’re regulating emotions and conserving their energies so that they don’t
face continual disappointment or overlook very real threats. In Hand to
Mouth (2014), a powerful chronicle of surviving on a low-wage job in the
US, Linda Tirado writes: ‘We don’t plan long term because if we do we’ll
just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can
get as you spot it.’
In this context,
social trust and agreeableness seem just as naive as adopting a sunny
disposition. If your brain picks up on cues that there are not enough resources
to go around, and if your experience of social interaction is of needing to
protect yourself in your neighbourhood or prove yourself beyond it, it is wise
not to have a trusting attitude toward strangers. In a review of studies on the link between socioeconomic
status and interpersonal orientations, psychologist Jessica Rea and I found
that experiencing low socioeconomic status when young leads to lower social
trust and agreeableness later in life, and this even played out in terms of
less responsive and harsher parenting styles. Analysis of the UK Household
Longitudinal Study by my PhD student Julia Buzan reveals that being
low in income is associated with perceptions of lower community cohesion,
greater neighbourhood crime, and increased social exclusion. The emerging
picture is one of material adversity triggering social adversity, such that it
is only wise to behave, and teach your children to behave, in ways that prevent
you or them being exploited by a hostile world.
In
sum, the four components of a mindset that
are claimed to enable flourishing – locus of control, self-regulation, approach
orientation, and being trusting and agreeable – are not only less common in
low-income contexts, they fit poorly to such contexts. Financial and social
precarity keep a person solidly focused on dealing with threats of the here and
now, such that ‘keeping an open mind’ and ‘thinking big’ become dangerous
abstractions. What those who are socioeconomically marginalised need is not
mindset coaching, but action that addresses the material deprivation, financial
precarity and social devaluation inflicted on them. Such action gets overlooked
when these mindsets are discussed as if they are accessible and beneficial to
all – free-floating – as opposed to tailored toward a privileged few.
If cultivating
these mindsets is of little use in addressing some of the biggest challenges
one can face, what are they good for, and where did they come from? I suspect
they emerge from a culture of Western free-market capitalism and reproduce the
values that maintain it. As deregulated economies emerged in the US and the UK
after the Cold War, free-market thinking advanced from the political sphere into
our personal lives. Realising one’s personal freedom, adopting a positive
outlook, focusing on achieving personal goals and using relationships to help
you along the way are four components of a mindset that I think reflects this
form of market thinking turned on the self. With my former Master’s student
Sabrina Paiwand, I am currently studying this advance by examining what happens
when such mindsets go into overdrive.
In these
situations, locus of control manifests as the unrealistic assumption of personal
responsibility for everything, self-regulation becomes the maintenance of
constant positive emotion, approach orientation generates an exclusive focus on
self-enhancement (and optimisation of all aspects of one’s life to achieve it),
and being trusting or agreeable to leverage relationships turns them into
instrumental market exchanges. Think of the last time you blamed yourself for
something that was out of your control, turned away from anything that spoiled
your mood, obsessed about using your time productively, and weighed up your
friendships in terms of the costs and benefits involved in them. We are all
enmeshed in this form of subjectivity, conditioning ourselves to fit with the
demands of the market, and expecting others to do the same. Yet our data show
that this way of thinking allows the poor to be blamed for their misfortune,
and encourages opposition to interventions to support them in favour of
attempts to change individual mindsets and behaviour patterns. At its extreme,
it harms the middle class too. Among those of middle or high socioeconomic
status, we find this way of thinking predicts perfectionism, narcissism,
Machiavellianism, stress, anxiety, and political disengagement.
Mindsets
are not free-floating. In low-income settings, they respond to socioecological
cues in ways that help people deal with the pressures of financial precarity
and marginalisation. In middle-class settings, they can subtly reflect
ideological agendas that uphold the economic status quo at the cost of everyone
but those at the very top. Before we prescribe a particular way of thinking for
those who appear to be struggling, we would do well to take a critical look at
why we are so attuned to that outlook in the first place.
Why
we shouldn’t push a positive mindset on those in poverty | Psyche Ideas
