Cederhill, a gifted scholar, was born in India and immigrated to the United States at the age of seven. Received three bachelor degrees in computer science, mathematics and economics. After graduating from college, he entered Harvard University to get a doctorate in economics. After graduating from Harvard, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began his research on behavioral economics. In Massachusetts, he founded the "Poverty Action Laboratory" with Abigit, an economics professor and author of The Essence of Poverty, and achieved fruitful results.
The title of the introduction is-scarcity of resources is not terrible, what is terrible is scarcity mentality. The introduction part introduces the concept of scarcity through two examples. The failure of time management is an example. The author Cederhill always feels that there is not enough time because there are many things. One is an example of the failure of Sean's money management in the book written by the author. Sean is deeply in debt and in a vicious circle. Therefore, the concept of scarcity-the feeling of having less than you need. For Cederhill, the occupation of time is less than the need; For Sean, the possession of money is less than the need.
Because the above two examples are examples, this book further looks for common cases of scarcity, and draws the conclusion that scarcity will capture the brain. Four cases are described in the book.
The first case was at the end of World War II. After the allied forces invaded the German-occupied areas, they found many people on the verge of starvation. In order to solve the problem of how to provide food for people, the allied forces launched a hunger experiment. In the experiment, it was found that people focused all their attention on food. Of course, it is reasonable for hungry people to make finding food their first priority. However, these people's concerns far exceeded their actual needs at that time. They wanted to open a restaurant, compare food prices and study recipes, all of which could not solve the concept that hunger aggravated hunger at that time. The first case concluded that these people were forcibly captured by hunger. This also changed their way of thinking.
The second case is also a hunger experiment. The subjects were divided into two groups, one group was hungry and the other group was not hungry. The two groups of experimenters just stare at the words on the screen, and the screen will display different words for 33 milliseconds, that is, 1/30 for one second, so that the subjects can recognize the words on the screen. Finally, we found that the hungry group and the non-hungry group performed equally well in recognizing non-food words. At the same time, the hungry group performed better in food vocabulary. However, 33 milliseconds is too short, far less than the normal response time of the brain (300 milliseconds). The rapid response of 33 seconds can only show that the effects of hunger and scarcity on the brain exist in automatic subconscious processing.
In the third experiment, children estimated the size of coins. As a result, in the eyes of children from poor families, coins look big and seriously distorted in size. That is, the coin caught the child's attention. In other words, scarcity not only affects attention, but also affects our cognition of things.
In the fourth example, subjects read someone's diary to form an impression on reporters who keep track of Japan. It turns out that lonely people do well. The conclusion is that lonely people are very good at remembering the details of social content such as interaction with others. This can be understood as social scarcity.
The conclusion drawn from the above four situations is that scarcity will capture the brain, and the influence of scarcity on the brain is deep into the subconscious, and scarcity will even affect the objective cognition of things.
Scarcity in the economic field is manifested as ubiquitous scarcity-because it is always limited from the perspective of money. Further leads to the sense of scarcity, the author believes that the sense of scarcity is not everywhere.
Scarcity depends on available resources and our own experience (our own understanding is objective facts and subjective feelings). Other disciplines such as sociologists, psychologists, neurologists, psychiatrists and marketers are trying to analyze this experience. The author said that he was concerned about the internal logic of scarcity and its consequences.
The internal logic of scarcity, scarcity is a state of mind, which will seize our attention, change our way of thinking and affect our decision-making and behavior.
As a result of scarcity, scarcity will reduce the capacity of the mind, make our cognitive ability lack insight and foresight, and weaken our executive control.
The author says that when scarcity grasps the brain, our attention will become more focused and we will do things more efficiently. But at the same time, there is no energy to devote to other things, and its impact is to reduce a person's bandwidth. The more serious consequence is that scarcity will continue further and aggravate scarcity.
This leads to a point in the book that scarcity will catch our attention and bring us some benefits: we can do better when dealing with urgent needs. But in the long run, we will lose more: we will ignore other things that need attention and become less effective in other aspects of life.