Different lives, different incentives

This is largely unrelated, except perhaps to the extent that it suggests that normal people often suffer from a lack or failure of not just affective empathy for those people that are considered different from them or are considered too remote to somehow trigger an empathetic response, but also cognitive empathy. People apparently have a very difficult time imagining what the lives of other people must be like.

From the Washington Post, "The big problem with one of the most popular assumptions about the poor", a discussion first of the infamous marshmallow experiment, in which child participants were asked to forego the instant gratification of one marshmallow in order to earn an additional marshmallow. The study participants were followed into adulthood and there was a correlation between ability to wait for the second marshmallow and general success, as society typically defines success. Also correlated, poverty and eating the first marshmallow without waiting. But why? Are they poor because they're impulsive? Or are they impulsive because they are poor? From the article:

The realization has sparked concerns that poverty begets a certain level of impulsiveness, and that that tendency to act in the moment, on a whim, without fully considering the consequences, makes it all the more difficult for poor children to succeed. But there's an important thing this discussion seems to miss. Poor kids may simply not want to delay gratification. Put another way, their decisions may not reflect the sort of impulsive nature we tend to attribute them to.

"When resources are low and scarce, the rational decision is to take the immediate benefit and to discount the future gain," said Melissa Sturge-Apple, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies child development. "When children are faced with economic uncertainty, impoverished conditions, not knowing when the next meal is, etc. — they may be better off if they take what is in front of them."

***
In some ways, this uncovers a broader problem with how we perceive the actions of people who live very different lives than we do. We brand certain actions and choices as mistakes, when they might simply be developmental adjustments necessary to cope with their environment. For those who don't worry about their next meal, because they never had to, choosing a marshmallow now instead of two marshmallows in a few minutes, all things equal, could only be the result of impulse-driven folly. For those who do have to worry about the next meal, passing up food now for the promise of food later is the misguided move.