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Poverty is a situation when a person's income is not enough to provide for basic needs. She has a lot of reasons, including external ones. It's not fair to say that low wealth is a person's choice and fault, and it's easy to become richer if you just want to. Of course, this is not the case.
But there are some psychological features that contribute to financial failure.
When they talk about self-esteem, they often focus on the inner suffering of a person and problems in relationships. But it also affects other aspects of life, including financial. And quite strongly F. Drago Self‑Esteem and Earnings / IZA Discussion Paper .
A person with low self-esteem often simply does not believe that he can claim a good income. It's even worse if he thinks that for some reason he doesn't deserve it. Therefore, he agrees to work with poor conditions and low salary, does not ask for a raise. And it's also easy to manipulate. All these "don't like it — put a statement on the table, there are a hundred people like you behind the fence" and "you should be grateful that you are paid for such work at all" are not arguments at all, but a game on low self—esteem.
Being in stressful situations is not always a bad thing. This forces the body to mobilize and also trains it so that in the future it will be easier to cope with such challenges M. D. Seery, E. A. Holman, R. C. Silver Whatever does not kill us: cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience / Journal of Personality and Social Psychology .
With long-term stress, everything is much worse. It affects the brain E. J. Kim, B. Pellman, J. J. Kim Stress effects on the hippocampus: a critical review / Learning & Memory , which may impair memory. Constant anxiety and anxiety make it difficult to assess the situation sensibly and make the right decisions, including financial ones.
And here it is also important to note that this is a vicious circle: lack of money causes stress. Because of what a person partially loses S. Mullainathan, E. Shafir Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much ability to process information, analyze the situation and determine priorities. And money, of course.
There are two views on this feature, and put forward by the same authors. Initially they conducted J. B. Overmier, M. E. Seligman Effects of inescapable shock upon subsequent escape and avoidance responding / Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology a number of experiments on animals and came to a disappointing conclusion. If someone is in a negative situation for a long time, which he cannot control in any way, he gets used to it and loses all faith that he is able to change something.
In humans, the processes are more complicated than in animals, so everything is not so straightforward. Nevertheless, learned helplessness is observed D. S. Hiroto, M. E. P. Seligman Generality of Learned Helplessness in Man / Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and we have. Such a person is passive, does not try to improve his life, even if he gets into favorable conditions, is not ready to make decisions. Perhaps in the past he tried to do something, but after being burned several times, he no longer shows any activity.
The updated version assumes that a person does not learn helplessness, but on the contrary J. B. Overmier, M. E. Seligman Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience / Psychological Review . He is born helpless, and then, under the influence of circumstances and the surrounding world, he acquires the belief that his actions bring results. Or does not acquire.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if someone has not had a positive experience throughout his life, has not received remuneration for his efforts, he puts up with the circumstances. And with poverty, too.
There are many attitudes in the life of each of us that help us make decisions faster. For example, the theses "if I go to training, I won't regret it, and if I don't go, I may regret it" or "it's impossible to be the best in everything" motivate us to get ready for the gym or not to make a tragedy of the second place in the competition.
Weget our installations literally from everywhere — from family, personal experience, books, and so on. But they don't always work well. Sometimes they are outdated, not effective specifically for us, or formed by mistake, because the result of some action was accidental. However, they continue to affect our lives because we tend not to notice them.
Negative attitudes regarding material well-being can make you do nothing. For example, if a person has it firmly in his head that all the rich are criminals, and he does not want to do anything illegal, then he will not strive for more income. And if a representative of the creative profession believes that an artist should be hungry, otherwise it is not art, then he will not be able to ask for decent pay for his work.
