Revisiting evidence for an attentional tunneling effect caused by scarcity

People in poverty sometimes behave in ways that perpetuate their socioeconomic condition. By one influential account, these behaviors arise from psychological effects of scarcity on attention that create greater focus toward managing scarce resources, at the cost of attention to potentially-beneficial information outside of this 'tunnel'. Although the tunneling hypothesis has been widely discussed in academia and beyond, its direct empirical support derives primarily from a landmark study by Shah et al. (2012) in which participants played games while their access to resources was experimentally manipulated, rendering participants either 'rich' or 'poor'. Here, we present new analyses that contest the original interpretation of the data, showing that the behavioral differences between 'rich' and 'poor' participants are more parsimoniously explained by the game's structure than by an attentional shift caused by the scarcity manipulation-a conclusion we substantiate through an additional experiment. We contextualize our findings within the literature on scarcity and attention, and highlight the need for greater clarity regarding the tunneling hypothesis itself.