Do scarcity-related cues affect the sustained attentional performance of the poor and the rich differently?

TL;DR

This study finds that scarcity-related cues do not disproportionately affect the attention of poor and rich people in online settings.

Contribution

It provides robust evidence against differential attentional impacts of scarcity cues across socioeconomic groups.

Findings

Scarcity-related cues did not differentially impact sustained attention between poorer and richer participants.

The cues facilitated scarcity-related thoughts but not financial worries.

Results were robust across various analytical choices and socioeconomic indicators.

Abstract

Cues related to financial scarcity are commonly present in the daily environment shaping people’s mental lives. However, prior findings are mixed on whether such scarcity-related cues disproportionately deteriorate the cognitive performance of poorer versus richer individuals. In our registered report, we collected a large study sample (N = 4280) using targeted sampling strategies to reach a diverse group of people along education and financial status. We focused on attentional performance to—compared to prior studies—more sensitively assess the effect of even brief lapses of attention. Using words related to absolute scarcity (poverty) and relative scarcity (abundance) as cues, we found strong evidence against the existence of a different effect on the sustained attentional performance between poorer and richer participants. The utilized cues facilitated scarcity-related thoughts but not financial worries, which may explain the absence of the effect. The findings were robust across various analytical choices, including the used outcome variable, exclusion criteria, outlier treatment and used socioeconomic indicators. Our results suggest that, in online contexts, exposure to scarcity-related words does not differentially impact sustained attentional performance across socioeconomic groups, highlighting important boundaries to the generalizability of scarcity theory.

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