How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
"The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..."
Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result? The story doesn't say, but if someone could post the relevant discussion from the journal article, I'd be interested in seeing it.
I'm sure it's there.
And obviously further details relating to this observation aren't already tested and published, it would take at least a few months for that to happen - if someone had already done and published a follow-up analysis, this article wouldn't be news but be outdated already.
Obviously this is something that can be controlled somewhat with the appropriate selection of subjects (there are a variety of families that have experienced generational rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags, for example). Though the N in those cases is likely to be smaller.
* Is this genuinely just a different way of processing rewards?
* Do low SES children not understand that money is a reward?
* Is there a capability gap at playing games? Or different responses to games themselves?
I don't think it makes intuitive sense that limited rewards leads to a lower response, so my guess is low SES children probably have a different relationship with money. My observation has been, in a weird but important way, that only a subset of high SES families seem to treat money as a desirable thing. Most people seem to have a what I see as a complex love-hate-contempt relationship with money. There isn't conclusive evidence in the article though.
As in they're stupid? How would they not understand it's a reward.
"* Is there a capability gap at playing games? Or different responses to games themselves?"
From the article - "Unbeknownst to the participants, the game was set up to control whether the guess would be correct or incorrect."
So no... that's not a possibility
A lot of people, if you give them a dollar they'll try to spend it on something. And that, counterintuitively, means they don't see the dollar as a reward. Someone who sees the dollar as a reward will put the dollar on their pile of dollars and then feel good because they have a dollar. The dollar, in itself, is the reward.
If someone is dirt poor, I assume they don't have a habit of seeing money as the end in itself.
I think Homer already deconstructed your argument, no not that Homer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A81DYZh6KaQ
But the question is, how can you attribute that behavior to the poor kids only if there is no mention of it in the study or article? Undoubtably some number of both the poor and rich kids are going to want to buy something with the money. Buried in your assumption is the assumption that poor kids are less likely to try to save money or that they don't see financial stability as rewarding.
And, in my opinion, the fact that the reward center of all the kids brains lit up fundamentally contradicts your central point. The poor kids did see the money as a reward for correctly guessing the answer in the game.
I can't. That was the hidden meaning behind the "interesting follow up questions" and "There isn't conclusive evidence in the article though." parts of my original comment.
And yes, that Homer clip is exactly the sort of flow I'm thinking about. The idea obviously isn't a new one. Compare it to a similar style of scene but with Mr Burns - he'd see the money and start comically salivating or something. Homer has a 10 second delay before even realising it is a good thing, just because he doesn't see money in itself as a goal.
Maybe they understand that the money will be soon taken away by the adults.
Either literally taken away, or simply the next time the kids need something, they will be told "now that you have money, you can buy it for yourself" (effectively taxing the income at ~ 100% rate).
But it's unlikely we'll make any advancements in our understanding of genes and intelligence or behavior, because this kind of research is out-of-favor and almost impossible to fund now.
Like, if it was determined tomorrow, with a huge article in nature or another journal that's suitably popular/prestigious that intelligence (and rewards for the sake of this thread) is totally inherited or even 80% inherited, what material changes would you want/expect to see in society in relation to that news.
This has a real impact on policy and investment, because we waste time on money on programs that have no chance of success.
Trying to remain ignorant isn't going to help us here, even if we have good intentions.
And presumably learn from it. While wasting a lot of money and effort (and people) on programs that won't work isn't good, neither is not trying because the effect is presumed, pre hoc, to be small or non-existent.
We live in a world where most people aren't enabled to achieve their potential. Figuring out that extrinsic rewards don't work to motivate behavioral changes or achievement for some people of a certain category, regardless of why, will hopefully result in the testing of other non-extrinsic-reward interventions that may work to motivate.
While it might be easier than for regular people, it's still extremely hard for a politician/academic or political faction/academic faction to admit error. It's almost always possible to come up with a reason for why something didn't work that doesn't require giving up on a centrally important idea.
Normally you look for deficits in people in order to account for them with special help, but this is a science just looking to shed blame. It's like testing for dyslexia to find kids that you shouldn't bother trying to teach to read. Or even worse, retroactively justifying your decision not to teach redheaded kids how to read by doing a survey of redheaded kids who were never taught to read, over a dozen generations, and finding them stupid.
That's the problem. The field is hopelessly tainted, and being an area that would be difficult under any circumstances (due to mass social effects rather than mass genetic effects), meaningful designs would be hard to find even if the researchers were motivated by something other than justifying the past.
In my experience, the people most obsessed with arguing and proving the usefulness of IQ are somewhere between 110-120. The people obsessed with the heritability of IQ and the supposed dominance of nature over nurture are often people who have raised terrible children.
aside: one thing I'm curious about and haven't found is that there are a number of researchers who show differences between American black achievement (slave descendants) and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean (who started arriving in 1965.) I haven't seen a lot of race science speculating about that: did slavers (either Western or the Africans who sold them) have some sort of filter that only put the stupid blacks into slavery? Were all the smart ones culled, and/or their intelligence intentionally bred out of them over generations? Did the admixture of the genetics of so many white slavers into their slave stock lower slave intelligence, or raise their propensity to violence? Or does that entire line of inquiry (or intense study of slave breeding in general) hold no interest for people trying to justify 18th century race science?
Governments offering free embryo selection plausibly.
IQ is 50 to 80% inherited [1]. (We can only predict about 10% of it with genetics [2].)
The premise of those studies is linear additive effects from each causal factor, which is almost certainly false; and in general, there is no way of establishing causation without interventional experiments. If the effects were plausibly non-linear, we would need 1 trillion+ data points even to establish statistically significant differences.
These fields are all cargo-cult stats, putting data into GUIs and printing pro-forma reports. The people involved are in way over their heads, to the degree that there isnt anything to "reproduce" let alone try to reproduce the experiments: they dont have any.
The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data.
When and where we are born definitely has an effect on personality, irrespective of family, in most cases. Astrological star data is a proxy for the when and where, and while thus would not be causative, would often be correlative. So it makes sense to do PCA on it as you'll identify a lot of good correlations.
So in the case of astrological analysis we would, if we wished to change population personalities change, say where people were born -- in the case of psychometrics we're told that we have no control over the causes whatsoever (genes).
In the vast vast majority of observational genetic studies genes are just proxies, in the the same way the star signs are. In other cases, they're mere correlations.
In the case of IQ (and basically all social genetic studies) it is highly likely that any correlated genes are merely proxies for geographic-historical distributions of peoples over time and it was the long-time-scale geographic and historical effects (culture, education, wealth, famine, poverty, war...) that we see in attainment.
(Setting aside that IQ tests aren't valid above average IQ and have extremely bad properties both at the individual and population level for most of the measured range. )
To say that "genes cause IQ" is several levels of confusion. The claim has nothing to do with whether genes determine the physiological body structure, the claim is whether relevant aspects of human intelligence are a product of the at-birth or developmental structure -- or of that acquired from the environemnt, ie., neural plasticity / brain structure / etc.
Almost all evidence we have is that relevant aspects of human intelligence are environmental, ie., acquired. There is little evidence of the alternative because the experiments needed to establish it are large impossible or unethical. So it might be true, but we have no evidence of it.
Insofar as any claims are made about genes and IQ they amount to associating markers of geographical-historical migration (ie., breeding across time) with a very bad proxy measure of abstract reasoning which, at best, only detects deficits with any reliabiliy.
So we have proxies on top of correlations on top of terrible measures of anything with zero reliability in the range of interest. This whole thing is operating nearly at fraudulent levels of "research".
There's very very little this field can say scientifically, since there arent any experiments. It's all pseudoscientific uses of stats.
To simplify matters, suppose that we know for sure that all above-average differences in IQ are 100% environmental/acquired-during-lifetime. Now, so what do twin studies show, on this assumption?
They show that genes must be correlating with these environmental measures, and twin studies give us an 'effect size' for geographical-historical patterns of reporduction.
So twin studies, even if they were valid (and their assumption of linearity renders them invalid), do not decide the matter. You need indpednent evidence of causal mechanisms from experiments, which doesnt exist.
Are you sure about that? If I find someone that we all agree is “pretty damn smart” and they regularly score 115+ and we find someone that we all agree is “not very smart at all” and they regularly score < 90. And we repeat that dozens of times, it seems like the IQ test is a measure of intelligence.
It may be imperfect, and pretty clearly does not have three significant digits of precision, but it seems it’s still a measure of the thing we’re trying to estimate, same as a set of mixed stones and a playground seesaw can provide a comparative measure of weight.
But all attempts to do this, i'm aware of, show in fact IQ tests don't behave this way. That all correlation with objective measures of performs, with reliable measures, end up random >100 -- and weakly non-random <100.
So what we, in fact find, is that IQ tests only reliably correlate in the 'mental retardation' region of performance.
There is, possibly, a sort of non-objective culturally feeling to the kinds of people who might do well on IQ tests. Call these personalities, "puzzler bureaucrats" it isnt clear that even for people in this population we're percing any sort of objective intelligence-related performance.
Eg., suppose we had an objective measure of intelligence based on a deep causal model of the brain and how it interacts with body/environment. Suppose we found out that a population who score 100-110 on IQ tests were vastly more intelligent than another scoring 120-130.
Now, could we find independent measures of performance to substantiate that? Yes, trivially. Take, eg., a group of CEOs and a group of maths undergrads. The former, could by supposition, have a much higher performance on a variety of objective measures.
Even assuming we agree that that’s the only usefulness of an IQ test, in what way does that make them not a measure of intelligence?
A ruler is still a measure of length even if it can’t measure the size of an atom or the distance to the moon.
this is no way to establish validity or reliability. you need an independent theory of intelligence and a variety of indepenent objective measures -- otherwise the whole enterprise is circular
> you need an independent theory of intelligence
Sure. We have some of these. Despite it's flaws and limitations I'm partial to portions of Guilford's Structure of Intellect.
> and a variety of indepenent objective measures
The various sub-tests in an IQ test are nominally independent, yes? Going back to your "CEOs", I don't see how a social position can be assumed to be objective when it is subjectively contingent on external social processes.
The experiment raising an infant chimpanzee alongside a human infant has been done. To presuppose that human intelligent is categorically distinct from chimpanzee intelligence such that this experiment does not lend evidence to a genetic basis of variations in human intelligence is further than I would go.
I presume that some amounts of variation in intelligence, as well as IQ scores, is due to factors that are neither directly genetic nor environmental, but are more random (such as cell division and post-fertilization DNA replication and rearrangements).
I don't understand this. Why would you need linear additive effects to think that if identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins and half siblings are less similar than full siblings along some axis then there is probably a genetic component?
Do you have a credible source for this claim? The criticism I'm seeing is largely constrained [1].
Note that heritability numbers are specific to a particular environment. E.g. if you have a more random environment with some kids exposed to lead poisoning, some to malnourishment and some to parasites you will get lower heritability figures.
Most studies on this are conducted in countries like Sweden and the USA on middle class populations.
Anecdote time, I identified the reward-seeking behaviour in my peers in early childhood and didn't understand it, I felt they were acting like dogs, being overtly manipulated to do what the grownups wanted, and I felt disgusted with the idea. (I was not an easy child, but then again, I grew up to be a rather disagreeable adult)
I come from a fairly normal lower middle-class family, but was consistently rewarded, except my response to praise and reward was mostly negative, and to some degree still is. I'm pretty sure my father was the same way, he'd do stuff for their own sake and his own sake, not because someone rewarded him for it. Unsurprisingly, taking into account how much potential I've been told I have, I'm a relatively low achiever, I'm simply not attracted to reward or winning very much, except maybe winning for its own sake, which just seems dumb.
We know for a fact that genetics has a large influence on personality.
.
We know for a fact that (at scale*) intelligence is the single largest influence on success.
IIRC, we're pretty sure that (at scale*) personality is the second largest influence on success.
I.e., if you measure all the possible things that might influence success and run a principal component analysis, intelligence is the first component and personality the second.
* Nepotism and such exist, but extreme cases are actually not that common.
.
It should not be controversial to acknowledge both part A and part B at the same time.
Well, if you can make a strong statement without any supporting argument, so can I.
This would imply that the problem with poor people lies within themselves rather than the society, which is an unacceptable proposition.
Why?
They're dumb because they're poor <-> They're poor because they're dumb.
Setting aside my moral issues with the idea of Economic Phrenology I think this is an acceptable checkpoint to stop at when trying to reason out an answer. Feel free to stop, look around stretch out your legs. And then get back on that train of thought and take it to the end. Why are they poor?
There's the circular logic argument of "well cuz they're dumb" but that ignores generational wealth, the gender wage gap, systemic inequality, luck, economics, and just a general lack of equity of opportunity.
Some people smart people choose low paying jobs because it brings them a fulfillment money cant. Some dumb people get rich off the lottery.
And like... We've all seen rich peoples kids. They're not all geniuses.
It's just not a coherent belief. It is demonstrably not true.
When you've built an economic system that distributes wealth that way you can't cast moral aspersions on the losers. Because that's what it does, creates losers by design.
To those complaining that the results are non-determinative (e.g. “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues”) that’s how science works: do some studies, make or evaluate a hypothesis, then you or others iterate on different dimensions, possibly untangling some variables or even refuting the results of such a study. It’s OK to be where it is at this stage.
Of course it’s hard to incorporate that ambiguity into a regular article, especially when you are writing for the university’s publicity office, which is what “MIT News” is.
Now, combine that with all of the other things we do know are SES (nutrition, access to resources like tutors, lifestyle & residential stability, etc, which seem quite difficult to ascribe to genetics)…
Oh well. To quote The FairlyOdd Parents: “You win some, you lose a lot!”
I'm with on the process where we do experiments, and hope they can help to step forward in a direction or another. But then we're discussing an expirement that doesn't have any real exploitable results yet...which is weird, and probably on us.
I still hope this doesn't get ropped into a meta analysis that takes the results at face value as one data point to correlate to other similarly flawed studies.
Poorer parents likely try to keep worries about money as far from their kids as they can, even if not easy. Rich parents might casually discuss investment ideas at a common dinner.
As a result a dollar may be seen much more as a reward by kids of rich parents than by kids of poor parents.
Looking at the study I also wondered why they chose something as controversial as real money.
That the response to rewards differs between poor and rich in general does't seem to be testable using a reward that both groups perceive differently.
I was eventually removed from my parents through the assistance of the courts and my grandparents who were witness to the significant mental and physical abuse I suffered at the hand of my parents. They had to spend the remainder of my youth/teens attempting to reverse the idea I had gained that everything that occurred in life of a negative nature must be inherently my fault, and the behavioural issues I had picked up resulting from that. By explaining that adults make choices, choices I cant be held responsible for when I had yet to even be born, etc etc. How successful they were is debatable because even into adulthood I've a tendency to assign blame/accept blame when it is apparently unwarranted according to those around me over the last couple of decades.
Aka my first assumption is always "this must be my fault in some way." even if I can not see an immediate manner in which that could possibly be true.
For context; my parents were actually poor because my mother never finished school, fell pregnant with me at 15, made poor life choices and her and my stepfather pissed most of their money away on cannabis for the duration of the time I was raised by them. Cannabis first, everything else later, if at all.
Somewhat more destructively, poor parents sometimes tell their kids money isn't important. There is an entire lower-class moral stack that regards money as sinful, which is difficult to disentangle from learned helplessness.
Attend services in upper-middle and high-income churches, and then in lower-middle and low-income churches. The messaging around money is different. Same when you hear parents teaching their kids.
A lesson I’ve not forgotten to this day. A family member set up a deal where me and my sisters had to feed three pigs for a period and look after them, the reward? The money when the little piggies were eventually sold.
And so we did, and we did it well, and were excited, as we’d never had money before due to how poor we were.
When the time came, our parents instead took the money, and told us they were entitled to it, and that we should be more grateful as it wa s our fault in the first place we had very little money and that we should think of this as doing our bit to pay a bit of that back. We were like…10-12.
That lived with me for a very long time.
Your teachers might be the most caring education professionals ever, but in your poor district, there's no much they can do consistently.
So, basically your brain probably says to you: Don't get over-excited with this, this is probably a one-of-thing.
poorer background kids tend get rewards at random intervals not intermittent intervals.
this is - as a contrasting example - what pushes them to "hustle" culture instead which does reward effort and in addition has intermittent reinforcement with bigger rewards from people who are entrenched in the culture and see a performer who needs motivation.
Children are slightly more intelligent than doves, so expecting us to behave like winged rats is both reductionist and insulting
I fundamentally believe that the higher-SES you are, the more agency you have (especially financial), where lower-SES are in constant survival mode. It is hard to get excited by small sums of money when you know that it will just be immediately spent on boring things.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...
> “If you’re in a highly resourced environment, with many rewards available, your brain gets tuned in a certain way. If you’re in an environment in which rewards are more scarce, then your brain accommodates the environment in which you live. Instead of being overresponsive to rewards, it seems like these brains, on average, are less responsive, because probably their environment has been less consistent in the availability of rewards,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
So, "Kids aren't as excited about getting things they're not familiar with."?
>"Here you got a thing"
A>>"um cool I guess"
B>>"oh nice I know something I can do with that!"
that ^^ sort of scenario?
It means that kid A's brain wont reward them as much when they complete a task that leads to rewards. Which in theory would lead to less motivation to undertake those kinds of tasks in the first place. The example in the article uses money, the kids obviously know what money is or it wouldn't be a motivator.
Basically, we're training poor kids to not even try because their brains have adapted to just accept the fact that it wont get the resources it needs.
> their brains reward them less
The reward centers show lower activity. This does not have to be some inscrutable thing only noticeable with a fMRI. It could perfectly well be that they're not used to turning extra money into things they like, and so because of that don't show as much activity in the "I just got rewarded" area.
These kids are poor they're not extraterrestrials.
I don't think it's fair to say poor kids aren't familiar with money. The study is on 12-14 year olds. The majority of kids buy lunch at school and even the ones on the free lunch program see their peers who splurge on 2 cookies or a soda from the vending machine or w/e.
My mom was a teacher, we were on welfare but that doesn't mean I wouldn't sometimes get birthday money. I collected coins from between the sofa cushions for junk food. I did odd jobs for spending money in the summer. I knew what money was and what it was for. Arguably more than well off kids.
> "oh nice I know something I can do with that!"
Why is that implied to be the rich kids response and not the poor kids? I worked in my dads convenience store when I was 12 and I saved up all summer so I could buy a ps2. Why is it assumed the poor kid isn't saving for anything?
I wonder if this has implications about the sense of agency people from different backgrounds feel (or not) in their lives.
I know this is pretty obvious and may not entirely answer your question, but many people find it very difficult to swallow this reality these days and I think it's worth reminding.
Now, in some respect everyone has the same amount of agency. No matter how rich or how poor one may be, they can tell the world to buzz off and do whatever they want to do, so in that sense they have the same agency. In reality, most people have an impulse to survive and meet those needs, like having food and so on, and people are cognizant of this fact. So unless you have the ability to provide all your needs, agency is mostly an illusion. Sure, you can do whatever you want but it’s a lot easier if you have a pile of money to cover your whims. If you don’t, well you might starve to death or die from some easily curable disease.
On the other hand, people who have grown up in poverty have been conditioned to believe that excellence doesn't really matter since there are few or no rewards to be had. Keep in mind, this is well below the level of conscious thought - it's a biological response.
Once you remember that humans are animals and are conditioned by their environment the same way animals are, stimulus and response, everything about our modern civilization makes total sense.
Also, if you succeed once in the friendly environment, you get praise and more support in your efforts. If you succeed in the unfriendly environment, people assume that you either cheated or simply got lucky but it won't happen again. So even after you succeeded at some small thing, it may still feel like there is no point.
When guessing, you're not making any effort, it's just random, nothing to do with "agency" or behaviour. It's just a lottery and the result is just logical: in the house of the poor, happiness is short-lived.
or alternatively, many mundane things are suddenly consequential things and rewarding? and this game lacked stimulation because it was inconsequential?
- Party on
- Be excellent to each other
"The main issue with modern psychology is that we have reams and reams of data and experiments on rich, white, college age people but nothing else. This data is the foundation of most psychology teachings."
Another meaningless study of rich white people is what this sounds like. Yeah of course a bunch of rich college people have been taught to value climbing the social ladder right in front of them the few remaining rungs to the top. When you are poor and realize you have to climb a mountain first to even get to the ladder the incremental rewards are not as important as the resilience to getting knocked back down again and again.
“Historically, many studies have involved the easiest people to recruit, who tend to be people who come from advantaged environments. If we don’t make efforts to recruit diverse pools of participants, we almost always end up with children and adults who come from high-income, high-education environments,” Gabrieli says. “Until recently, we did not realize that principles of brain development vary in relation to the environment in which one grows up, and there was very little evidence about the influence of SES.”
Without this very type of study one could mistakenly do exactly what you’re accusing them of doing. I also didn’t see race mentioned. I’d assume the opposite of your presumption i.e. that this finding would stand regardless of race.
>They were told that for each correct guess, they would earn an extra dollar, and for each incorrect guess, they would lose 50 cents.
Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game). Probably only second to people not considering SES even when they are studing SES.
I am more interested in reading about debunked studies rather than new ones, as you can tell I have a huge general assumption that they will be poorly performed.
I guess the one thing that was also left out from my comment was also that most of these experiments are carried out by college age undergrads that are rich (and still mostly white).
Yeah they are "overseen" by someone with a PHD.... who depends on getting as many papers as possible published. Which is another issue. As I said I obviously have some serious bias against the validity of most "social science"
Do you have one or two references for this I could take a look at?
I'm as wary of bias and mistakes in research as "the next person" but if they are measuring brain activity it gets more interesting. To establish that there isn't some validity to this experiment then one would have to show that the brain's reward center can respond while receiving a reward while playing a game but not respond when receiving a reward in a different "non-game" context.
If such research exists or it's been established as fact that this is true, that would seem like a glaring omission from this study. I'd be interested to see that.
Secondarily, you avoided addressing the race question entirely :) I'll assume it is safe to say there is some bias there as well then.
That is probably correct. I wasn't specifically dunking on this study about the race component. Its just a huge issue with this field in general. Also(My take) the race doesn't have so much to do with it as the typical culture from what we classify as race but since culture type is not ever tracked anywhere "race" is all we have to go on. There by my take could be someone that is "black/asian/indian/whatever" but raised in "white" culture and would count from a psychology experiment standpoint as white.
Sorry I don't have them, too much cruft online to find them. Mostly as debunks to other experiments where when real stakes are used the experiment could not be replicated. You may be able to find them searching "replication crisis" as one of your keywords but I don't have time to dig them up right now. its just a fringe minor interest of mine.
On a side note: Have you ever participated in any of these? I have and I've seen participants actively undermine the spirit of the experiment while in the experiment, making side bets and such. Usually there is some sort of cap on what you can get 5-20$ or something and people there are basically saying the few bucks was just for beer money or whatever so they are willing to risk it to make a "Pot" out of the money and one person can have a nice day from it. Again since most of the people available for these experiments (despite what TV portrays) are not really hard up for the few bucks from the couple hours they spend participating. (based on my real world experiences)
Could that have been part of the experiments? Maybe. Maybe for some of them, but not all the ones I've seen for sure. And they used that data to "prove" something...
I am saying give the same opportunities to people from lesser social backgrounds. They will not disappoint.
I’m a fan of Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards