Chapter 2 - Cognition and Decision-Making in Societal Context

Summary

Poverty has an important impact on cognitive processes and decision-making, but this topic is neglected in mainstream psychology and almost completely absent from the standard introductory psychology textbooks. The causal-reductionist model of mainstream psychology leads to a focus on intra-personal characteristics. If this perspective is adopted to examine the psychology of poverty, the result is more 'blaming the victim,' in the sense that the characteristics of individuals (personality, intelligence, motivation, and so on) would be used to explain poverty. In this sense, psychology is ideology. That is, psychology serves to justify the status quo, depicting the poor and the rich as meriting their positions on the basis of intra-personal characteristics. The emerging research on psychology and cognition demonstrated that poverty in important ways shapes cognitive functioning.