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Today on Mindset Monday I speak with Jiaying Zhao about the Scarcity mindset and how it impacts everyone. She brings her own story about growing up in China living in an area experiencing poverty and tells us that is has led her to dedicate her life to researching and helping some of the most vulnerable and poor people. She shares her lens on this topic as well as some research and statistics from her work.

Meet Jiaying


 

Jiaying has her PhD in Cognitive Psychology and is an Assistant Professor for the Department of Psychology at UBC. She is a Canada Research Chair (t2) in Behavioral Sustainability. She belongs to the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. She loves her work of research, supervising students, research projects, teaching, and service.

On The Synergy Mindset Podcast, she takes us back to the beginning of her story and shares about her life growing up in China. She tells us she grew up poor and had intimate experiences in her family and in society at that time. Her family got out of poverty and she was able to pursue an education in Canada.

She was interested in poverty because of her personal experience and when she was in graduate school, one of her Ph.D. advisors was working on poverty. Jiaying jumped on board immediately because it was a personal interest and passion of hers since childhood. They wanted to understand what makes the poor poor and for the last decade have been investigating a psychological cognitive explanation of the behaviors of low-income individuals.

Scarcity Mindset is a condition of not having enough or the feeling of not having enough. This can be money, time, calories, pretty much anything. It is experienced by pretty much everyone in the world.

When someone is feeling scarcity they begin to tunnel their resources. They focus only on the task at hand and can end up making poor decisions due to a lack of seeing the big picture.

Jiaying uses the example of money scarcity and how people borrow money, such payday loans, with high interest to solve the moment's problems. They neglect everything else and those other things are equally important. This is a cognitive phenom.

There are other scarcity mindsets. There are social driven ones as well. In society, we tend to view low-income individuals as lazy or not-competent and it is most of the time, unfair and not true. The poor suffer a lot of stigma because of their poverty identity. Therefore, a poor person may be worried about how others view them based on the perception that they know the average person will view them. These are mental burdens on the poor.

It uses cognitive resources and the worry has effects. This constant worry reduces IQ, decreases performance and testing, When Jiaying grew up in China in the 80's everyone was poor therefore she experienced equality. Here in Canada, we have inequality of super-rich to all ranges which causes even more of a stereotype.

We need to change the public perception of the poor and there are several initiatives on the way. 
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
A vicious cycle, the person perceives the stereotype is true about them, therefore, acts with behavior that is destructive or will be in ways to confirm the belief and ends up becoming the person that the stigma projects. It can be broken by realizing the stereotype or belief is not true. This is how we can begin to dissociate the situation from the individual. The individual can change their belief about themselves and therefore change their behavior.

Policymakers can help make a difference as well. Jiaying has met with leaders to discuss how the government can help by increasing the overall income for low-income people. She suggests that we look at the impact the cash incentives will have on a person and what their individual needs... --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lvmountaintops/message