Photo by Jusdevoyage on Unsplash, this article comes from the WeChat public account: Wei Xizhibei (ID: weixizhibei) < / span> , author: Wei Xi

Poverty affects IQ?

You might be able to say, maybe, the rich people seem to be smarter, but how to prove this through experiments?

You cannot directly measure the IQ of the poor and the rich and then draw this conclusion directly, which is obviously not rigorous enough.

So is there a strict way to prove the conclusion that “poverty affects IQ”?

The answer is yes!

One, a natural experiment

Professor Ced Hill of Harvard University successfully demonstrated this through an experiment, so how did he do it?

Professor found a natural statistical population in the East-the sugar cane farmers in India. The farmers here only harvest around June each year, and after the harvest they will get a sum of income, which is their whole year. income.

This means For the same Indian sugarcane farmer, he is relatively wealthy in the first two months after the harvest season, but no matter how frugal he is, by April and May of the following year, Even one or two months before harvest, he will fall into a relatively poor state.

This is supported by data: only 4% of sugarcane farmers who went to pawnshops after a month after harvesting compared to 78% of those who went to pawnshops one month before harvesting.

The next step is how to scientifically measure the IQ of sugarcane farmers before and after harvest. IQ is a difficult state to define. The standard WeiThe Intelligence Test is actually a complex test method. Its results are related to multiple factors such as age and education, and are considered unsuitable for Indian sugar cane farmers.

So Professor Seid Hill chose another well-known IQ test method in the industry-Raven’s reasoning test, which is a relatively simple geometric reasoning test.

This test is more universal, and it has little to do with a person ’s knowledge, age, and educational level. Obviously, this test is more suitable for Indian sugarcane farmers.

Is it possible to test immediately after finding this test method?

No, rigorous academic research needs to continue to exclude other interference factors. The other factors here mainly include two points:

First, the food intake of sugar cane farmers before and after harvest, that is, the need to eliminate hunger from affecting IQ.

Second, it is necessary to exclude whether their labor levels are the same before and after harvest. The labor level may also affect IQ.

Before the test, the professor made sure that the two points were the same, that is, the only variable of the two test results was the economic condition of the sugar cane farmers.

Finally, the professor used the Raven reasoning test to test the scores of Indian sugarcane farmers one month before harvest and one month after harvest. The result was that the pre-harvest score was 25% lower than that after harvest.

The author draws a simple conclusion through this natural experiment: poverty affects IQ.

Second, busy: a vicious circle we must avoid

So why does poverty affect IQ?

Popularly speaking, Poverty makes people shortsighted, people