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How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background

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

#61

Post by sokoloff »

mjburgess wrote: post #60
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do know that genes are a cause of IQ (we can see this comparing our nearest non-Homo relatives. But yes, we are far away from saying which genes do cause it, much less how they cause it, and how they interact with the environment and other genes to cause it.

IQ is a test, it isnt intelligence and isnt even a measure of intelligence. It is valid only for establishing certain sorts of mental retardation in a human population. To say that "genes cause IQ" is several levels of confusion. The claim has nothing to do with whether genes determine the physiological body structure, the claim is whether relevant aspects of human intelligence are a product of the at-birth or develo…

> IQ is a test, it isnt intelligence and isnt even a measure of intelligence.

Are you sure about that? If I find someone that we all agree is “pretty damn smart” and they regularly score 115+ and we find someone that we all agree is “not very smart at all” and they regularly score It may be imperfect, and pretty clearly does not have three significant digits of precision, but it seems it’s still a measure of the thing we’re trying to estimate, same as a set of mixed stones and a playground seesaw can provide a comparative measure of weight.

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

#62

Post by qprofyeh »

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.

We read the same article. I interpret less reaction to rewards as being more appreciative. It’s deep, but hear me out. Less reaction means they (and myself included once) have the same expectation as the ones giving the reward, it being an equilibrium. Because the rewards match the expectation over a longer period of time, that’s why they (again, from personal experience) stay hungry for a longer period of time. It will take much longer for a smart poor person to really think they’ve made it to the other side permanently.

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

#63

Post by LtWorf »

dusted wrote: post #56
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?…

This was my thought too, ofc. it's not a popular idea these days that genetics and heredity might have some bearing on success, but it does seem worthwhile looking into.. Anecdote time, I identified the reward-seeking behaviour in my peers in early childhood and didn't understand it, I felt they were acting like dogs, being overtly manipulated to do what the grownups wanted, and I felt disgusted with the idea. (I was…

Looking into? Sure! Claiming that it's already established science when it absolutely isn't however…

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

#64

Post by qprofyeh »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #12
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.

Are you saying it'd be good to take it further... e.g. increase taxes so we have more hungry, appreciative people. Would we have better companies and economy if this was applied to corporate officers?

What? No I did not.

I am saying give the same opportunities to people from lesser social backgrounds. They will not disappoint.

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

#65

Post by itronitron »

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…

A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat, say no more, say no more!

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

#66

Post by mjburgess »

sokoloff wrote: post #61
mjburgess wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ is a test, it isnt intelligence and isnt even a measure of intelligence. It is valid only for establishing certain sorts of mental retardation in a human population. To say that "genes cause IQ" is several levels of confusion. The claim has nothing to do with whether genes determine the physiological body structure, the claim is whether relevant aspects of human intelligence are a product of the at-birth or develo…

> IQ is a test, it isnt intelligence and isnt even a measure of intelligence. Are you sure about that? If I find someone that we all agree is “pretty damn smart” and they regularly score 115+ and we find someone that we all agree is “not very smart at all” and they regularly score It may be imperfect, and pretty clearly does not have three significant digits of precision, but it seems it’s still a measure of the thin…

Er, sure, if you can define some objective measures of performance that are taken to be symptomatic of intelligence and correlate those with IQ test results -- and then show test-retest validity across a wide population (etc. etc.), then you'd have a case.

But all attempts to do this, i'm aware of, show in fact IQ tests don't behave this way. That all correlation with objective measures of performs, with reliable measures, end up random >100 -- and weakly non-random So what we, in fact find, is that IQ tests only reliably correlate in the 'mental retardation' region of performance.

There is, possibly, a sort of non-objective culturally feeling to the kinds of people who might do well on IQ tests. Call these personalities, "puzzler bureaucrats" it isnt clear that even for people in this population we're percing any sort of objective intelligence-related performance.

Eg., suppose we had an objective measure of intelligence based on a deep causal model of the brain and how it interacts with body/environment. Suppose we found out that a population who score 100-110 on IQ tests were vastly more intelligent than another scoring 120-130.

Now, could we find independent measures of performance to substantiate that? Yes, trivially. Take, eg., a group of CEOs and a group of maths undergrads. The former, could by supposition, have a much higher performance on a variety of objective measures.

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

#67

Post by theshackleford »

almostnormal wrote: post #30

A dollar is not a dollar. A dollar is something different for kids than it is for their parents. A dollar for a kid of rich patents is not the same as a dollar for a kid of poorer parents. Poorer parents likely try to keep worries about money as far from their kids as they can, even if not easy. Rich parents might casually discuss investment ideas at a common dinner. As a result a dollar may be seen much more as a re…

Anecdotal obviously, but mine made no such attempt. I was reminded constantly of our financial situation and furthermore, was normally informed through various means how it was my fault for one reason or another. Yay.

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

#68

Post by a_wild_dandan »

gumby wrote: post #16

This is counter to how I would have guessed, which makes it quite interesting! To those complaining that the results are non-determinative (e.g. “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues”) that’s how science works: do some studies, make or evaluate a hypothesis, then you or others iterate on different dimensions, possibly untangling some variables or even refuting the results of such a study. It’s OK to be…

I likewise had the opposite intuition: low SES brains will have higher reward response to make the most out of fewer opportunities. Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. That would track nicely with the erratic, easily distractible ADHD behavior that began in my childhood.

Oh well. To quote The FairlyOdd Parents: “You win some, you lose a lot!”

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

#69

Post by theshackleford »

nradov wrote: post #14

These findings may be somewhat particular to just money. One pernicious part of growing up poor is that the moment a child gets a bit of money it is taken away. Parents might seize the money to help the family, or other friends and relatives might guilt them into a "loan". It would be interesting to see if the experiment is reproducible with other rewards that are more durable or harder to take away from the subjects…

> One pernicious part of growing up poor is that the moment a child gets a bit of money it is taken away.

A lesson I’ve not forgotten to this day. A family member set up a deal where me and my sisters had to feed three pigs for a period and look after them, the reward? The money when the little piggies were eventually sold.

And so we did, and we did it well, and were excited, as we’d never had money before due to how poor we were.

When the time came, our parents instead took the money, and told us they were entitled to it, and that we should be more grateful as it wa s our fault in the first place we had very little money and that we should think of this as doing our bit to pay a bit of that back. We were like…10-12.

That lived with me for a very long time.

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

#70

Post by pessimizer »

Avicebron wrote: post #38
nostromo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I can tell, the reason why science is continually trying to prove black people inferior (let's not bury the lede) is in order to put the current condition of black people in America as a result of nature and not of hundreds of years of slavery and slave breeding, and of the current condition of black people in Africa to their inferior brains instead of the violent takeovers of their countries, mass enslavement and massacres, and the installation of friendly dictators to ship their resource wealth overseas.

Normally you look for deficits in people in order to account for them with special help, but this is a science just looking to shed blame. It's like testing for dyslexia to find kids that you shouldn't bother trying to teach to read. Or even worse, retroactively justifying your decision not to teach redheaded kids how to read by doing a survey of redheaded kids who were never taught to read, over a dozen generations, and finding them stupid.

That's the problem. The field is hopelessly tainted, and being an area that would be difficult under any circumstances (due to mass social effects rather than mass genetic effects), meaningful designs would be hard to find even if the researchers were motivated by something other than justifying the past.

In my experience, the people most obsessed with arguing and proving the usefulness of IQ are somewhere between 110-120. The people obsessed with the heritability of IQ and the supposed dominance of nature over nurture are often people who have raised terrible children.

aside: one thing I'm curious about and haven't found is that there are a number of researchers who show differences between American black achievement (slave descendants) and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean (who started arriving in 1965.) I haven't seen a lot of race science speculating about that: did slavers (either Western or the Africans who sold them) have some sort of filter that only put the stupid blacks into slavery? Were all the smart ones culled, and/or their intelligence intentionally bred out of them over generations? Did the admixture of the genetics of so many white slavers into their slave stock lower slave intelligence, or raise their propensity to violence? Or does that entire line of inquiry (or intense study of slave breeding in general) hold no interest for people trying to justify 18th century race science?

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