Financial scarcity impacts attention and thinking for pleasure.

People believe those experiencing scarcity engage in more pleasurable thinking.

Data shows that people experiencing scarcity actually do less pleasurable thinking.

Pleasurable thinking is a fantastic gymnasium for the human mind. It is the reason why daydreaming and letting your imagination run wild is fun. Thinking about positive upcoming experiences or alternative realities often leads to happiness and can serve as a mechanism to escape from the mundane. For instance, we think about what we will do during our next day off while working or imagine what it would be like to have dinner with our favorite celebrity.

Recently, a team of researchers set out to investigate who tends to engage in pleasurable thinking in terms of the financial resources people have at their disposal. On the one hand, the prediction that people who have less financial resources would engage in more pleasurable thinking makes perfect sense. Thinking happy thoughts is a zero-cost intervention which brings joy to the thinker. In a scene from the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, the hustling Chris Gardner (played by Will Smith) struggles with home insecurity as he competes for a cut-throat job in finance. After being evicted from the motel where he and his son have been living, they are forced to spend the night in a public transit bathroom. To escape the harsh reality of their situation, he pretends that they are in a time........

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