Scarcity and stress deplete mental bandwidth for future-oriented thinking

Evidence

Human attention is selective for a good reason. When I was a postdoctoral researcher, studying with Eldar Shafir, currently Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, I learned a lot about the idea of ‘cognitive bandwidth’. Eldar studies decision-making in the context of poverty and wrote an entire book about how the circumstance of poverty can be detrimental to adaptive decision-making. Here’s the basic idea: if you’re relatively poor, your attention is occupied with working out how to pay the bills, putting out fires, and making ends meet, leaving much less brainpower to dedicate to planning and anticipating future problems. It turns out that this principle generalizes fairly well. If I stress you out, your mental bandwidth for other things will steadily decline. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 116

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Eldar Shafir’s scarcity research (e.g., Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much) on how deprivation taxes cognitive bandwidth. — connects to: A scarcity mindset alters neural mechanisms underlying goal-directed decision making, captured via fMRI in the orbitofrontal cortex. — A scarcity mindset alters neural processing underlying consumer decision making; Stress drives the brain toward cognitively cheaper confirmation bias — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 117; Stress depletes cognitive resources and narrows how people perceive their in-groups — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 546 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Does this diminish judgment specifically relevant to misinformation susceptibility, not just planning — i.e., is the stressed brain more gullible or just more myopic?

Broader Connections

• Stress drives the brain toward cognitively cheaper confirmation bias #expands (0.90) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 117
• Stress depletes cognitive resources and narrows how people perceive their in-groups #expands (0.85) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 546
• Technical acceleration contradicts rather than explains modern time scarcity and stress #contradicts (0.80) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 236
• Market mechanisms sometimes amplify rather than correct human cognitive limitations #expands (0.75) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1207
• Humans can override environmental dictates through symbolic future-thinking #qualifies (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 154