The condition

The sugar-cane farmers of Tamil Nadu, who took the same cognitive tests tight and comfortable, come back here from another angle. What ManiManiMeasured farmers in Tamil Nadu before and after the harvest. The same farmers did better on the tasks after being paid.One reference in this work:2013Poverty impedes cognitive functionSee in the bibliography → et al. (2013) showed is not that poor people decide worse, but that lack of resources occupies the mind and what is left for the task is less. The same men, when comfortable, did better.

A caveat has to come along, because I demand it of other people. The laboratory half of that paper, the one with financial vignettes in a shopping centre, did not pass a replication audit published in 2021, and a study with low-income families in the United States, measuring before and after payday, found no difference in cognitive function. The field study, the one with the farmers, is what still stands, and it has already taken a criticism of method about retest effects.

That touches two laws here. Temporal discountingTemporal discountingIf the value takes time to appear, deliver pieces of it along the way.Open the law → says we prefer the smaller-now to the larger-later, and before payday the curve gets steeper, which is not a failure of character. The people who measured that were not Mani but CarvalhoCarvalhoOne reference in this work:2016Poverty and economic decision-making: evidence from changes in financial resources at paydaySee in the bibliography → and colleagues, in 2016, and the difference showed up in choices with money and not in choices with effort. And cognitive loadCognitive load theoryAdd up everything the screen asks for at once, and take away half.Open the law → has a lower ceiling, because part of working memoryworking memoryThe mental space where the person holds what they are using right now. It holds about four things, and they fade in seconds if they are not used.See it in Memory →See in the glossary → is already occupied with the electricity bill, and that part is Mani’s finding.

If your product is payroll credit, a loan, a benefit or a debt renegotiation, you are designing for people in scarcity by definition. Designing with the curve of the comfortable body misses exactly the audience the product serves.

And there is the other side, which is ethical rather than technical. Manufactured scarcity biasScarcity biasOnly show scarcity when it is true, and say what the limit is.Open the law → — the countdown, the “last two in stock” — meets someone who already lives in real scarcity. The same lever that is persuasion for one audience is pressure for another.

This example is the most beautiful and the most dangerous on the site, and it is worth telling to the end.

ChenChenNoticed that languages that separate the future from the present are associated with less saving, and raised the hypothesis that Roberts would later refine.One reference in this work:2013The effect of language on economic behavior: evidence from savings rates, health behaviors…See in the bibliography → (2013) noticed that some languages force the future to be marked grammatically — “it is going to rain” — and others do not: in German or Mandarin you say the equivalent of “tomorrow it rains”. He called the second kind weak-future and showed, with data from dozens of countries, that their speakers save more, smoke less and reach retirement with more assets. The hypothesis: marking the future pushes it away, and what is far away costs less to sacrifice.

If that were true the way it sounds, it would be enormous. Portuguese is a strong-future language. So is English.

Two years later, RobertsRobertsRedid Chen’s count controlling for the kinship between languages, and the effect shrank considerably.One reference in this work:2015Future tense and economic decisions: controlling for cultural evolutionSee in the bibliography →, Winters and Chen (2015) redid the calculation controlling for kinship between languages. Related languages are not independent observations, and treating them as if they were inflates the correlation. Under the stricter tests, and without aggregating by country, the correlation does not hold. It survives several other tests, so it did not die — it shrank.

Notice the third name on the second paper. It is the same Chen. The author of the finding signs the work that limits his own finding, and that is why I tell this story here instead of telling only the first half. The question was right, the answer is smaller than it looked, and whoever cites the headline cites it wrong.

FlowFlow stateRaise the difficulty at the same speed the person improves.Open the law → presumes continuous attention and control over your own task. Someone interrupted by occupation — support, on-call work, caring for another person — does not enter flow through difficulty tuning. The curve of challenge and skill that flow presumes is not theirs.

Parkinson’s LawParkinson’s lawGive effort a limit with deadlines and interim goals, real ones and not invented ones.Open the law → presumes you own your time. Ask anyone who works shifts.

And the Zeigarnik effectZeigarnik effectSignal the end of each step; an open task keeps taking up space.Open the law → deserves a caution it rarely gets: an open task occupies the mind, and that is what makes the progress bar work. For someone with anxiety, that same open task does not become motivation. It becomes rumination. The lever is the same, and in someone with anxiety it does the opposite.