Socioeconomic status
Chapter 2 - Society
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Welcome to the Socieoeconomic status page
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Socioeconomic status (SES) is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person's work experience and of an individual's or family's access to economic resources and social position in relation to others.
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Core ideas
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Stress and poverty
There is strong empirical support for the notion that poverty gets “under the skin,” meaning that the experience of poverty can lead to long-lasting biological changes in individuals.
Childhood poverty is linked to both increased activity in threat-detecting brain circuitry and decreased activity in self-regulatory circuitry. When a child is extra vigilant to potential threats in the environment at school (e.g., remarks from a teacher or classmate, or a sense of being “behind” her peers) and lacks the tools to reason through and regulate that sense of threat, she is unlikely to be able to focus optimally on learning in the classroom.
Importantly, the same neural mechanisms may confer children growing up in adverse circumstances with “hidden talents” that facilitate their ability to function in harsh, unpredictable environments, including enhanced social perception, attention shifting, and creativity.
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| Disrupting links between poverty, chronic stress, and educational inequality - M. Harms - Science of Learning - 2023 |
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Poverty and the all-consuming fretting that comes with it require so much mental energy that the poor have little brain power left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study.
The mental strain could be costing poor people up to 13 IQ (intelligence quotient) points and means they are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that amplify and perpetuate their financial woes.
Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton who worked on the research team, said it was not stress in general, but financial worries in particular, that led to a reduced ability to make sound decisions. "The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems," he said. "But they don't have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks".
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| Scarcity and cognitive function around payday: A conceptual and empirical analysis - CSAE Working Paper WPS/202004 |
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