The worth of self-worth

Poverty and severe hardship affect more than a million Australians and around the world, more than a billion people are desperately poor. While some of the poor are recognised as being victims of a variety of circumstances, there are still those who blame some people for their own poverty and think it is simply a matter of “getting off their backside”. There are structural social issues that can keep people in poverty but as a new study has shown, to help people climb out of poverty there are psychological issues that also need to be addressed.

The study involved visitors to a New Jersey soup kitchen. The subjects were asked to privately record a personal story that was a proud moment or past achievement using a tape recorder before doing a variety of problem solving tests. Their results were compared to a control group who had not recalled a past moment.

Those who had done the recall did better on the tests equivalent to a ten point increase in IQ. In follow up it was found that these people were also more likely to seek out information on aid services from the government.

The recall of past achievements is essentially an exercise in self-affirmation and the researchers believe that this helps alleviate the mentally overwhelming stigma and cognitive threats of poverty. We know that then stigma and threat of poverty can impair reasoning, lead to bad decisions, and perpetuate financial problems.

Other research from Harvard has shown that poverty consumes so much mental energy that those in straitened circumstances have few mental resources left to devote to other areas of life or to getting out of their situation. So poverty becomes a vicious psychological circle.

This study suggests that intervention to boost the self-worth of people in poverty could be a useful strategy to help them begin to break the cycle they have become trapped in. You should never underestimate the worth of self-worth.