Short and sweet: “Hand To Mouth” and the rationality of the poor

[unrepentant progress]

A couple months old, but I just stumbled on Mathbabe's post linked in another blog.

I’ve long thought that the “marshmallow” experiment is nearly universally misunderstood: kids wait for the marshmallow for exactly as long as it makes sense to them to wait. If they’ve been brought up in an environment where delayed gratification pays off, and where the rules don’t change in the meantime, and where they trust a complete stranger to tell them the truth, they wait, and otherwise they don’t – why would they? But since the researchers grew up in places where it made sense to go to grad school, and where they respect authority and authority is watching out for them, and where the rules once explained didn’t change, they never think about those assumptions. They just conclude that these kids have no will power.

More: http://mathbabe.org/2014/11/03/hand-to-mouth-and-the-rationality-of-the-poor/

[KT2000]

1. yes - conclusions are often

the result of assumptions. Those assumptions are not proven to be true but are accepted if the majority has the same biases.

[upaloopa]

2. I think you just described most conclusions

at DU.

[KT2000]

3. the problem comes in

when we call it science as opposed to an opinion.

[upaloopa]

4. Also when we call it fact as opposed to an opinion

[Fumesucker]

5. Good thing you and I never do that

We are exceptions to that rule, eh?

[upaloopa]

8. Not me. I am no different than anyone else.

What I post is my opinion.

[Igel]

6. Not the first.

2012 study, U Rochester.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027712001849

Points out that this should have been a suspect assumption at the time.

Also the problem isn't the original study itself. It's what others, often in the ed industry, made of it. The ed theoretic industry has a bad habit of not knowing the literature that they dip into well enough to be able to make wise (as opposed to cherry-picking) use of it.

[jtuck004]

7. Simply being in poverty makes decision making different, and so much harder than it seems

for people outside.

...
The mental tax that poverty can put on the brain is distinct from stress, Shafir says. Stress is a person’s response to various outside pressures that, according to studies of arousal and performance, can actually enhance a person’s functioning.

In the new study, published in Science, researchers instead describe an immediate rather than chronic preoccupation with limited resources that can be a detriment to unrelated yet still important tasks. “Stress itself doesn’t predict that people can’t perform well; they may do better up to a point,” Shafir says. “A person in poverty might be at the high part of the performance curve when it comes to a specific task and, in fact, we show that they do well on the problem at hand.

“But they don’t have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems. It’s the other tasks where they perform poorly.”
...

- See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/08/30/Does-Poverty-Lead-to-Poor-Decision-Making#sthash.A4DXrJ0a.dpuf

[GTurck]

9. The metric...

of poverty and the metric of stability are so totally different that unless the difference is acknowledged the outcomes will always be wrong. Either we need more empathy from social scientists or they need to live a year or so without resources. I don't mean no money to survive just not enough to do more or to survive a serious problem alone. It would take at least a year of that to get the flavor of poverty that millions live with their whole lives.