Poor Save Most in Lab Rat Race, Study Reports

It would seem a low-income worker bringing home a meager paycheck would spend it immediately rather than save for a rainy day, economists say.

But a new study shows laboratory rats with a meager supply of food have more self-control and are much more likely to “save” than their well-off brother rats.

“This study does not take into account all the psychological issues, but it does show in a natural state the urge of the poor is to restrain themselves and save,” said John H. Kagel, an economics professor at the University of Houston who participated in the study at Texas A&M; University.

“It was totally the opposite of what we expected,” he said.

Kagel and his colleagues fed half of their laboratory rats very well for over a year while partially starving the other half. The rats were then taught that two levers produced food in two different ways, he said.

Food Dispensers

The first lever provided a small amount of food immediately and the second lever produced a substantially larger portion of food after a delay.

The skinny rats were far more likely to wait for larger rewards than the fat rats, which wanted food immediately, said Kagel. This shows the poorer rats were willing to do without food for a time, or “save” it, for greater rewards at a later time.

“We fully expected the fat rats to be more interested in saving than the skinny rats that had previously lived a hand-to-mouth existance,” said Kagel.

“It was the skinny rat that had more control over himself than the high-income rat,” he said. “They were able to tighten their belts and wait while the high-income rats had less ability to wait for their rewards.”

Kagel said the experiment was undertaken by economists after researching studies of humans that showed higher-income people are much more likely to save than the poor.

He said few human studies have been able to determine if the rich save a proportionately larger share of their income than the poor.

Natural Instincts

“We wondered what was the instinct in the natural state,” he said. “We thought perhaps the urge to save in the poor is as strong as in the rich. But then we discovered that, in a very pure state, it may be stronger.”

Kagel said the rat study has only a limited correlation with humans because the economists were not able to introduce the psychological aspects of saving into the laboratory experiment.

“The experiment doesn’t tell us how choices (to save) are made,” said Kagel, who said lower income workers have a much more complex set of considerations than a laboratory rat in a cage.

For instance, poor people may have a lower incentive to save because they have been disappointed by attempts to save in the past or because they are influenced by advertising for material goods they don’t really need but desperately want.

“This does show us the poor have a lot more natural self-control than we may have realized,” he said.