Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Read Free

scarcity also capture the mind. In one study, children were asked to estimate from memory, by adjusting a physical device, the size of regular U.S. coins —from a penny to a half-dollar. The coins “looked” largest to the poorer children , who significantly overestimated the size of the coins. The most valuable coins—the quarter and half-dollar—were the most distorted. Just as food captures the focus of the hungry, the coins captured the focus of poor children . The increased focus made these coins “look” bigger. Now, it’s possible that poor children are simply unskilled at remembering size. So the researchers had the kids estimate sizes with the coins in front of them, an even simpler task. In fact, the poor children made even
bigger
errors with the coins in front of them. The real coins drew even more focus than did the abstract ones in memory. (And with no coins around, the kids were highly accurate at estimating similarly sized cardboard disks.)
    The capture of attention can alter experience. During brief and highly focused events, such as car accidents and robberies, for example, the increased engagement of attention brings about what researchers call the “subjective expansion of time
,
” a feeling that such events last longer, precisely because of the greater amount of information that is processed. Similarly, scarcity’s capture of attention affects not only what we see or how fast we see it but also how we interpret the world. One study of the lonely flashed pictures of faces for one second and asked subjects to describe which emotion was being expressed. Were the faces conveying anger, fear, happiness, or sadness? This simple task measures a key social skill: the ability to understandwhat others are feeling. Remarkably, the lonely do
better
at this task. You might have thought they would do worse—after all, their loneliness might imply social ineptitude or inexperience . But this superior performance makes sense when you consider the psychology of scarcity. It is just what you would predict if the lonely focus on their own form of scarcity, on managing social contacts. They ought to be particularly attuned to reading emotions.
    This implies that the lonely should also show greater recall for social information. One study asked people to read from someone’s diary and to form an impression of the writer. Later they were asked to recall details from the diary entries. The lonely did about as well as the nonlonely. Except in one case: they were much better at remembering the entries that involved social content, such as interactions with others.
    The authors of this study relay an anecdote that nicely summarizes how loneliness changes focus: Bradley Smith, unlucky in love and lacking close friends, finds his perception changes after a divorce.
Suddenly, Bradley cannot escape noticing connections between people—couples and families—in exquisite and painful detail. At one time or another, Bradley’s plight may have befallen most of us. Perhaps, similar to Bradley, a romantic relationship ends, and you find yourself noticing lovers holding hands in the park. Or your first days in a new school or job place you in a world of strangers, in which each smile, scowl, or glance in your direction assumes added significance.
    Bradley, you might say, is the social equivalent of the starving men, leafing through his own cookbooks.
THE ORIGINAL SCIENCE OF SCARCITY
    When we told an economist colleague that we were studying scarcity, he remarked, “There is already a science of scarcity. You mighthave heard of it. It’s called economics.” He was right, of course. Economics is the study of how we use our limited means to achieve our unlimited desires; how people and societies manage physical scarcity. If you spend money on a new coat, you have less money for a dinner out. If the government spends money on an experimental procedure for prostate cancer, there is less money for highway safety. It is remarkable