Glossary
Scarcity
What is scarcity?
Scarcity means there is less of a resource than people want or need. Time, money, and goods can all be scarce, but a shortage of cash and an almost-sold-out product pose different psychological questions.
Examples of scarcity
A limited budget can require choosing which expense to cover. Too little time can require choosing which task to finish today. These are resource constraints; making a tradeoff does not by itself show a cognitive error.
In consumer settings, limited availability may also be used as a clue to an item's value. That narrower idea is the scarcity heuristic. It is different from studying how a lack of money or time affects attention.
What the research says about money
A 2024 meta-analysis found a negative relationship between financial scarcity and cognitive performance. The estimate was smaller after accounting for education, which matters when interpreting differences between the groups studied.
A separate 2024 meta-analysis by Szécsi and Szászi asked a narrower question: do reminders of financial scarcity impair poorer participants' cognitive performance more than richer participants'? Support for that claim was limited and depended on the statistical assumptions.
Why it matters
Living with financial constraints is different from briefly thinking about them in an experiment. Neither result means that people with less money are inherently less capable. Findings about financial scarcity also cannot tell a marketer whether a limited-stock message will sell more products.