Is your IQ low? Blame your empty wallet

BY GARDY CHACHAS

Whenever Kenya Certificate of National Examinations (KCSE) results are announced, schools like Sunshine Academy, Alliance High School and Mang’u High School never miss the top list.

Easily noticeable is the fact that most – if not all – students who attend these schools, and who go ahead to lead everybody else, come from either middle class or out rightly rich families.

Ever wondered the connection?

In a study published in the journal Science, a team of researchers from British universities and US selected 400 people at random and divided them into ‘poor’ or ‘rich’ group based on their income and afterwards performed intelligence testing on them.

To their amazement – and mine too – they found that being poor reduces a person’s IQ by up to 13 per cent: participants in the poor category performed much worse in the IQ test if they first considered their economic circumstances, but those in the ‘rich’ group remained unaffected.

“The gap between the rich and the poor goes up, in both IQ and impulse control,” pointed out Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, as reported by international media. “Our results suggest that when you’re poor, money is not the only thing in short supply: cognitive capacity is also stretched thin”

To prove the results of the study, the researchers also visited a village in rural India, where sugarcane farmers are paid the majority of their income once a year. The farmers performed significantly better at intelligence tests in the month after being paid than before – when their savings were no more.

As it turns out, the amount of money you have does not only makes you capable of affording expensive things; it also influences your intelligence. If you have limited financial abilities you are more likely to make bad decisions.

Mullainathan thinks that the possible explanation to these findings would be that a person experiencing poverty suffers a cognitive deficit because his mind is dealing with many issues at different levels of life. As a result, they “have ‘less’ mind to dedicate to everything else,” including thought process.

Do you feel thick inside your cranium? Blame your empty pockets.