Poverty and limited attention

Stefanie Yvonne Schmitt and Markus G. Schlatterer

No 159, BERG Working Paper Series from Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group

Abstract: In this article, we analyze whether the financial strain of poverty systematically alters the allocation of attention. We address two types of attention: attention to unexpectedly occurring events and attention to primary tasks that require focus. We show that the poor are significantly more likely than the rich to notice unexpected events. In addition, we find evidence that the poor notice unexpected events at the expense of attention to the primary task only if the task is sufficiently difficult.

Keywords: inattentional blindness; limited attention; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/222978/1/1726715485.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:bamber:159

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BERG Working Paper Series from Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().