Cognitive Effects of Shopping Under Scarcity

Abstract

Scarcity, the problem of not having enough and wanting more, affects everyone. Forthose living under poverty, scarcity is omnipresent, as every decision requires a complexbalancing act between one’s available budget and one’s needs and wants. To investigate thecognitive toll that these considerations may take, we recruited participants to play a gamemirroring shopping tasks that one might make in real-life, examining their performance onoptimizing trade-offs between quality and price within the game, as well as on a variety of tasksmeasuring effects on stereotyping, attention to detail, mental calculation, and memory. Overall,we found that those facing scarcity performed worse on the game overall and tended to be worse at forming new memories. The inherent disadvantages apparent from our results that come with scarcity suggest that popular characterizations of the poor are misinformed and that we ought to reconsider scarcity in line with encumbrances such as cognitive load. Furthermore, we highlight the differences in ability between the rich and poor in maximizing spending returns, implying that scarcity forces suboptimal decisions that could end up more costly in the long run.