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| Sendhil Mullainathan |
Toward the end of World War II, while
thousands of Europeans were dying of hunger, 36 men at the University
of Minnesota volunteered for a study that would send them to the brink
of starvation. Allied troops advancing into German-occupied territories
with supplies and food were encountering droves of skeletal people they
had no idea how to safely renourish, and researchers at the university
had designed a study they hoped might reveal the best methods of doing
so. But first, their volunteers had to agree to starve.
The physical toll on these men was alarming: their metabolism slowed
by 40 percent; sitting on atrophied muscles became painful; though their
limbs were skeletal, their fluid-filled bellies looked curiously stout.
But researchers also observed disturbing mental effects they hadn’t
expected: obsessions about cookbooks and recipes developed; men with no
previous interest in food thought—and talked—about nothing else.
Overwhelming, uncontrollable thoughts had taken over, and as one
participant later recalled, “Food became the one central and only thing
really in one’s life.” There was no room left for anything else.
Though these odd behaviors were just a footnote in the original Minnesota study, to
professor of economics Sendhil Mullainathan,
who works on contemporary issues of poverty, they were among the most
intriguing findings. Nearly 70 years after publication, that “footnote”
showed something remarkable: scarcity had stolen more than flesh and
muscle. It had captured the starving men’s minds.
Mullainathan is not a psychologist, but he has long been fascinated
by how the mind works. As a behavioral economist, he looks at how
people’s mental states and social and physical environments affect their
economic actions. Research like the Minnesota study raised important
questions: What happens to our minds—and our decisions—when we feel we
have too little of something? Why, in the face of scarcity, do people so
often make seemingly irrational, even counter-productive decisions? And
if this is true in large populations, why do so few policies and
programs take it into account?
In 2008, Mullainathan joined Eldar Shafir, Tod professor of
psychology and public affairs at Princeton, to write a book exploring
these questions.
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
(2013) presented years of findings from the fields of psychology and
economics, as well as new empirical research of their own. Based on
their analysis of the data, they sought to show that, just as food had
possessed the minds of the starving volunteers in Minnesota, scarcity
steals mental capacity wherever it occurs—from the hungry, to the
lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor.
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