OBJECTIVE POVERTY AND WILLINGNESS TO DELAY GRATIFICATION: DO DIFFERENT POVERTY THRESHOLDS AND COGNITIVE LOAD MATTER?

Objectives. Poverty has been premised as one of the main causes of various forms of non-productive behaviour such as the unwillingness to delay gratification. The paper aims to examine the relationship between income, as an objective economic indicator, and poor delay of gratification. It puts a particular focus on different poverty thresholds and also after taking cognitive load into account. Sample and settings. A total of 697 participants (out of which 233 also completed the retest) were recruited in two data collections. The participants provided information about their household income, frequency in experiencing negative affect and stress (together forming cognitive load) as well as their tendency to delay gratification. Statistical analysis. The effect sizes for each subsample and poverty threshold were synthesized in a multilevel meta-analysis. Additional Bayesian estimations served as a sensitivity analysis. In order to test whether the average effect sizes differed from hedges' g = 0.2 (our smallest effect size of interest), equivalence testing was used. Results. The results indicated very small effects of poverty thresholds on the willingness to delay gratification. Hedges' g varied from -0.01 to 0.20 for all the performed analyses. Study limitations. The potential limitations/explanations of the results have been identified. In particular, the core sociodemographic aspects of the sample, the possible social desirability in responding, the general over-reliance on objective poverty thresholds when explaining psychological concepts as well as the rather low verisimilitude of existing theories.