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How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

news.mit.edu

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Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

#31

Post by nostromo »

romaaeterna wrote: post #5

fMRI results show that children from lower-SES backgrounds are less stimulated by monetary rewards. "The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..." Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result?…

Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents, and that's been proven multiple times with large-scale studies of adopted twins. It wouldn't surprise me if reward response was similar.

But it's unlikely we'll make any advancements in our understanding of genes and intelligence or behavior, because this kind of research is out-of-favor and almost impossible to fund now.

Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

#32

Post by anonymouskimmer »

PeterisP wrote: post #24
romaaeterna wrote: post #5

fMRI results show that children from lower-SES backgrounds are less stimulated by monetary rewards. "The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..." Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result?…

They obviously didn't, and didn't need to - that sentence is not making any assertion, it is suggesting a hypothesis that can be tested in future work by them or others. The sole assertion this study is making is about the existence of the effect, and it is only speculating (and not hiding that it's speculating) about a possible mechanism causing that effect. And obviously further details relating to this observation…

I agree that that sentence didn't, but further down in the article stronger claims are made, sometimes obliquely referencing prior work. So it would be interesting to see the original paper to see what they cite as supporting evidence for this hypothesis.

Obviously this is something that can be controlled somewhat with the appropriate selection of subjects (there are a variety of families that have experienced generational rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags, for example). Though the N in those cases is likely to be smaller.

Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

#33

Post by santoshalper »

narag wrote: post #29

Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker, but that's not what I believe "reward" means. When guessing, you're not making any effort, it's just random, nothing to do with "agency" or behaviour. It's just a lottery and the result is just logical: in the house of the poor, happiness is short-lived.

They intentionally chose a game of chance to eliminate motivation driven by an inherent desire to perform well at a task, isolated from the reward. Their goal was to isolate the response to the extrinsic reward (prize), vs. people who just enjoy doing well at things.

Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

#34

Post by Avicebron »

roughly wrote: post #13
qprofyeh wrote: post #11

So put plainly, hire people who come from low income families because they appreciate rewards more, and stay hungry for longer.

Article states the opposite - people from low income families react to rewards less than those from higher income families.

So theoretically then they would be more level headed employees, and might not have as strong inclination to harm others with their seeking of SES. e.g. the reward stimulus of money is lessened so the negative externality of harm is a stronger counterbalance?

Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

#36

Post by PeterisP »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #32
PeterisP wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They obviously didn't, and didn't need to - that sentence is not making any assertion, it is suggesting a hypothesis that can be tested in future work by them or others. The sole assertion this study is making is about the existence of the effect, and it is only speculating (and not hiding that it's speculating) about a possible mechanism causing that effect. And obviously further details relating to this observation…

I agree that that sentence didn't, but further down in the article stronger claims are made, sometimes obliquely referencing prior work. So it would be interesting to see the original paper to see what they cite as supporting evidence for this hypothesis. Obviously this is something that can be controlled somewhat with the appropriate selection of subjects (there are a variety of families that have experienced genera…

I think a problem is that this press release is mixing content from the scientific study with an interview of experts talking about it, and the colloquial assertions made in that conversation happen to have a bunch of extra speculation that isn't part of the study they discuss; for half of the press release the "standard of evidence" is like in science and for the other half it is like in this HN discussion thread, where people do rise many interesting (and possibly true) hypotheses where we don't have any evidence (yet).

Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

#38

Post by Avicebron »

nostromo wrote: post #31
romaaeterna wrote: post #5

fMRI results show that children from lower-SES backgrounds are less stimulated by monetary rewards. "The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..." Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result?…

Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents, and that's been proven multiple times with large-scale studies of adopted twins. It wouldn't surprise me if reward response was similar. But it's unlikely we'll make any advancements in our understanding of genes and intelligence or behavior, because this kind of research is out-of-favor and almost impossible to fund now.

Well, I think the issue isn't the research exactly, it's the motivations behind doing the research.

Like, if it was determined tomorrow, with a huge article in nature or another journal that's suitably popular/prestigious that intelligence (and rewards for the sake of this thread) is totally inherited or even 80% inherited, what material changes would you want/expect to see in society in relation to that news.

Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

#39

Post by citizenpaul »

I read a quote once that said something like.

"The main issue with modern psychology is that we have reams and reams of data and experiments on rich, white, college age people but nothing else. This data is the foundation of most psychology teachings."

Another meaningless study of rich white people is what this sounds like. Yeah of course a bunch of rich college people have been taught to value climbing the social ladder right in front of them the few remaining rungs to the top. When you are poor and realize you have to climb a mountain first to even get to the ladder the incremental rewards are not as important as the resilience to getting knocked back down again and again.

Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

#40

Post by mjburgess »

nostromo wrote: post #31
romaaeterna wrote: post #5

fMRI results show that children from lower-SES backgrounds are less stimulated by monetary rewards. "The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..." Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result?…

Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents, and that's been proven multiple times with large-scale studies of adopted twins. It wouldn't surprise me if reward response was similar. But it's unlikely we'll make any advancements in our understanding of genes and intelligence or behavior, because this kind of research is out-of-favor and almost impossible to fund now.

Unfortunately the field of observational statistics called "psychometrics" which has "proved" this using "twin studies" is largely bunk.

The premise of those studies is linear additive effects from each causal factor, which is almost certainly false; and in general, there is no way of establishing causation without interventional experiments. If the effects were plausibly non-linear, we would need 1 trillion+ data points even to establish statistically significant differences.

These fields are all cargo-cult stats, putting data into GUIs and printing pro-forma reports. The people involved are in way over their heads, to the degree that there isnt anything to "reproduce" let alone try to reproduce the experiments: they dont have any.

The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data.

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