Open Collections

Tomm, Brandon M.

University of British Columbia

Financial scarcity affects attention and decision making, but it is not known how these effects translate to behaviours which can make the condition of scarcity even worse. It is also not well understood which cognitive mechanisms are affected by scarcity. In 10 experiments, I used a variety of scarcity-induction methods and scarcity measurements to examine how scarcity can affect a variety of psychological processes. I found that scarcity induced an attentional bias such that people under an objective financial constraint were not able to adaptively up-regulate attention to useful information, resulting in a reduction in the use of a useful discount that would have alleviated the financial constraint in the first place (Chapter 2). Follow-up studies suggested that the attentional burden of scarcity can be partially alleviated by moving crucial information closer to the centre of focus (Chapter 3). Next, I used a numerical perception paradigm to investigate how both scarcity-scenario priming and cognitive load affect perception of hypothetical future income and future expenses (Chapter 4). This paradigm was extensively fruitful in showing how objective scarcity, subjective scarcity, and relative subjective scarcity can have independent effects on numerical perception. In general, people under objective scarcity estimate lower totals of future income and expenses while people under subjective scarcity estimated higher totals of future income and expenses. This is a novel finding with important theoretical implications for the scarcity literature: Scarcity is not a unitary construct and future research must account for the variety of ways scarcity can be experienced. Finally, I investigated how scarcity affects attention and decision making with regard to a job advertisement (Chapter 5). I found no evidence that scarcity affects how people attended to the job advertisement. These results support the need to differentiate the different varieties of scarcity in future research.

Text

2024-06-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88529

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/