Comment on “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function”

Abstract

Mani et al. (Research Articles, 30 August, p. 976) presented laboratory experiments that aimed to show that poverty-related worries impede cognitive functioning. A reanalysis without dichotomization of income fails to corroborate their findings and highlights spurious interactions between income and experimental manipulation due to ceiling effects caused by short and easy tests. This suggests that effects of financial worries are not limited to the poor. (1) recently presented four laboratory experiments and a field study that aimed to show that poverty impedes cognitive functioning. We criticize their results on statistical and psychometric grounds.Mani et al. ran three randomized experiments in which U.S. adults were assigned to read one of two sets of financial scenarios that differed in their activation of financial concerns. Although participants' income varied from $7560 to $160,000, Mani et al. used a median split to analyze income data. This procedure has been criticized strongly for being associated with lower power, loss of information on individual differences, and its inability to pinpoint nonlinear relations (2). Of the two measures of cognitive functioning in Mani et al.'s studies, only the Raven's scores are fairly symmetrically distributed. We therefore submitted these data to linear regressions involving family income (mean-centered to facilitate interpretation) and an interaction between income and the type of scenario. Results are given in Table 1. In none of the three core experiments (1, 3, and 4) was the interaction significant when analyzed without unnecessary dichotomization of income. We also analyzed data from study 2, which aimed to show that the effect of poverty-related worries could be distinguished from a form of test anxiety and would not occur in similar, but nonfinancial, scenarios. We note that the second experiment is appreciably smaller (N = 39 people) than the other three experiments (N > 95 people) and so is associated with lower statistical power. Of importance are the regression weights; those from study 2 are not appreciably different than those in the core studies.The second measure of cognitive functioning employed by Mani et al., cognitive control, showed nonnormal distributions that render them unsuitable for linear analyses (see Fig.

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