Site Under Construction!

This is for your kind information that the site you have entered is presently under construction. We are grateful for your patience to wait for the time of its official launch. Thanking you!!! Praveen.

POVERTY AND PERSONALITY

A PAPER ON POVERTY AND PERSONALITY
                                                    By: Rev. Praveen John M.Div, DCPC, (M.Sc)
                                                     A Clinical Psychology Specialist & Philosopher

                                                                                                          

Introduction

            There are many factors that influence personality. Poverty is one among them. Personality is an organized and distinctive pattern of behavior, thought, and feelings which characterizes a person’s adaptation to a various situations and which endured overtime and set persons apart from each other. Poverty is the lack of basic human needs, such as clean water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter, because of the inability to afford them. Poverty has a devastating effect upon the entire human personality.

   Present paper is an attempt to portray the significant relationship between poverty and personality in Indian context.

Poverty

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term poverty means the state of being very poor, the state of lacking in a particular quality.[1] Encarta encyclopedia[2] states poverty as (1). state of being poor: the state of not having enough money to take care of basic needs such as food, clothing, and housing, (2). lack: a deficiency or lack of something Poverty of emotion, (3). Infertility of soil: lack of soil fertility or nutrients.[3] Thus poverty can be said as one’s lack of sources to meet his/her survival.

The concept poverty

The concept poverty is a situation that gives rise to a feeling of a discrepancy between what one has and what one “should have”. What one should have is an internal construct; hence each person’s feelings and experience of poverty is individual and unique. But the feeling of ‘powerlessness’ and ‘resourcelessness’is possessed by all poor people. Berstein Henry (1992) has identified the following dimensions of poverty.[4] They are (1) Lack of livelihood strategies, (2) inaccessibility to resources (money, land, and credit), (3) Feeling of insecurity and frustration, Inability to maintain and develop social relations with others as a consequence of lack of resources.[5]

Three precepts are often used to define poverty: (1) the amount of money required by a person to subsist. (2) Life below a ‘minimum subsistence level’ and ‘living standard’ prevalent at a given time at a given place, (3) comparative state of well being of a few and the depravation and destitution of the majority in society.[6]

Poverty in India

The attitudes of Indians towards the causes of poverty as measured by their place of control and socio-demographic background were studied. Culture have internal place of control and make more individualistic attributions of poverty. The independent variable of class did not appear as a predictor to the structural attribution for poverty. [7]

Below Poverty Line (India)

Below Poverty Line is an economic benchmark and poverty threshold used by the government of India to indicate economic disadvantage and to identify individuals and households in need of government assistance and aid. It is determined using various parameters which vary from state to state and within states.[8]

Causes of poverty in India

According to William A. Haviland, casteism is widespread in rural areas, and continues to segregate Dalits. Others, however, have noted the steady rise and empowerment of the Dalits through social reforms and the implementation of reservations in employment and benefits.

Caste explanations of poverty fail to account for the urban/rural divide. Using the UN definition of poverty, 65% of rural forward castes are below the poverty line.

British era

The Mughal era ended at about 1760. Jawaharlal Nehru claimed "A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today."^[  The Indian economy was purposely and severely deindustrialized, especially in the areas of textiles and metal-working, through colonial privatizations, regulations, tariffs on manufactured or refined Indian goods, taxes, and direct seizures.

India's economic policies

In 1947, the average annual income in India was US$439, compared with US$619 for China, US$770 for South Korea, and US$936 for Taiwan. By 1999, the numbers were US$1,818; US$3,259; US$13,317; and US$15,720, respectively. (Numbers are in 1990 international Maddison dollars) In other words, the average income in India was not much different from South Korea in 1947, but South Korea became a developed country by 2000s. At the same time, India was left as one of the world's poorer countries.[9]

Different Causes of Poverty

Poverty has many causes, some of them very basic. Some experts suggest, for instance, that the world has too many people, too few jobs, and not enough food. But such basic causes are quite intractable and not easily eradicated. In most cases, the causes and effects of poverty interact, so that what makes people poor also creates conditions that keep them poor.[10] The following are the important causes of poverty.

Overpopulation

Overpopulation, the situation of having large numbers of people with too few resources and too little space, is closely associated with poverty.[11]

Global Distribution of Resources

Many experts agree that the legacy of colonialism accounts for much of the unequal distribution of resources in the world economy. In many developing countries, the problems of poverty are massive and pervasive.[12]

High Standards of Living and Costs of Living

Because people in developed nations may have more wealth and resources than those in developing countries, their standard of living is also generally higher. Thus, people who have what would be considered adequate wealth and resources in developing countries may be considered poor in developed countries.[13]

Inadequate Education and Employment

Illiteracy and lack of education are common in poor countries. Governments of developing countries often cannot afford to provide for good public schools, especially in rural areas. Long periods of unemployment can be hazardous to both physical and mental health.[14]

Environmental Degradation

In many parts of the world, environmental degradation—the deterioration of the natural environment, including the atmosphere, bodies of water, soil, and forests—is an important cause of poverty.[15]

Economic and Demographic Trends

Poverty in many developed countries can be linked to economic trends. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, most people in the United States experienced strong income growth.

Individual Responsibility and Welfare Dependency

There are differing beliefs about individual responsibility for poverty. Some people believe that poverty is a symptom of societal structure and that some proportion of any society inevitably will be poor.[16]

Personality

Personality is the dynamic organization with in the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristic behavior and thought.[17] According to dictionary of pastoral care and counseling, personality is the dynamic organization with in the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his enviournment.[18]

Influence of poverty in personality

Early Personality development

Personality can be greatly affected with poverty.  The orderly development of the human organism begins in the mother’s womb long before the baby’s birth. Perhaps the most universally recognized condition of the human being is helplessness and passive dependency in early childhood. Usually the mother is the person who provides the child with fulfillment of his biological needs during infancy. Visual attention is highly necessary thing here. Stimulation and deprivation are the outcome of caring children. Effects of social isolation by a lazy care towards child affect his personality. An effect of enriching the environment is inevitable for active personality. Social attachment also pays a vital role for enriching personality. Toilet training has been viewed as an important event in transition from infancy to later development. Sex and aggression are two patterns of behavior especially likely to produce problems in our culture because they generate anxiety and conflict for many people.[19] The child’s experience in these areas may become a basis for later problems. Achievement behaviors tend to be related to the child’s ability and to the stimulation and encouragement for achievement available in his environment. Inappropriate care towards child in this early personality development period due to poverty survival[20] may create lots of personality problems in child such as anxiety disorder, mistrust, in durability, aggressive behaviors, etc. thus there is a need of an active care in this period for child’s absolute personality development.

Learning, Emotion and Motivation

After the birth social learning process is starting to highlight. Observational learning and the cognition are the effective mechanism for the same. Rules and symbolic information help child to get bits of counting data and help child for achieving the ability to learn and remember those materials. Awareness help child to learn the things accurately. Anxiety and punishment in socialization is a common phenomenon of this time. The child learns from various sources. The various agents of socialization[21] may exert their influence at different age periods and in different situations. Emotions ranging from positive to negative, subtle to intense, given human experience richness and meaning. Emotional states have motivational effects.[22] An emotional state may have a drive like activating effect, motivating the individual to take action. Some recent analyses suggest that arousal may function like a drive or biological tension state. Thus in this stage emotion should take as a primary motivating factor for personality development. Lack of proper nutrition and psychological help for developing emotion and motivation child develops emotional instability and anger nature.

Sex typing and Personality Development

            Psychological sex differences and the sex typing process through which they develop are crucial aspects of personality. Aggressive behavior is one of the main dimensions on which sex differences have been considerably found. Sex type is the development of patterns of behavior considered appropriate for one sex but not the other. Social learning theories stress that children with every culture learn quiet early about sex differences in behavior.[23] Parents and other significant social agents encourage the child’s sex appropriate behavior and ignore or punish sex-inappropriate behaviors in the course of development. There is a need of a proper care for behaving on the basis of identifying sex. Poverty may cause to be away to identify their sexuality type behaviors if the proper care not given to child.

Identification and Observational learning

            Identification had been the favorite theoretical mechanism to explain how children develop broad attributes and generalized behavior patterns similar to those of their parents. Children are exposed in many models, and obviously they do not imitate all of them in similar degree. Similarity between the observer and the model often enhances imitative tendencies and facilitates observational learning. Child needs identity formation on his growth. If effectively organized care is not given, it affects the whole personality growth of a child which can cause a personality disorder in later stage.

Frustration and Aggression

            Frustrating situations involve an interruption or delay in the attainment of an expected goal. Aggressive is an effective attention-getter. Nonaggressive reactions to frustration are possible, and they occur if they have proved effective in the individual’s past. One nonaggressive effect of frustration and aggression suggest that even such responses to frustration as friendliness and self-punitive behavior may reduce arousal if they have previously been effective in terminating aversive circumstances. People with poverty go through various forms of frustration and aggression. People become sad and depressed which can lead to psychotic illness.

Anxiety

Anxiety may be defined as an acquired fear. The experience of anxiety involves an intense feeling of fear or dread of impending danger accompanied by a state of autonomic physiological arousal. A person’s anxiety effects on quality of performance. Usually the intensity of anxiety reactions is directly related to the objective intensity and duration of the experienced stress.[24] Avoidance or escape behaviors performed in a state of anxiety become strengthened when they are successful in reducing the anxiety state. Poverty makes anxiety disorder due to the lack of availability of resources in time. Worrying about next moment makes increased anxiety which causes to anxiety disorder and other physical illness.

Defense

The Freudian concept of defense mechanisms refers to attempts to cope cognitively with internal anxiety arousing-cues with out awareness- that is, unconsciously. Individual differences in coping with stress and anxiety-arousing cues seem to fall on a continuum from avoidance behaviors to supersensitive and vigilant ones. The defensive mechanisms are seen as inhibiting the individual’s basic motives in some contexts but as permitting repressed materials to slip through in less guarded circumstances.[25] Poverty leads to apply different defensive mechanisms to cope up with the situations. Children with poverty develop the habit of stealing and involving the violence and other antisocial activities to earn money when they grow up. It destroys the creativity in them.

Self Control

Persons learn to set their own performance standards and to make their self-reward contingent upon achievement of the self-prescribed criteria. Children patterns of self reward are influenced by the models whom they have observed, as well as by standards imposed them through direct training. Individual show some consistency in their control patterns across situations. There also are great individual differences in perceived control over outcomes and perceived responsibility for the things that happen. People faces poverty has few times to be with energetic form of personality formation for self control. Lacking mature guideline for self control affects personality as indifferent nature.

Self concepts

            The person’s existing construct system influences his new impressions. Self concepts developed as a result of the outcomes a person has obtained in the past and expects to obtain in the future. Self-esteem level has been related to other aspects of personality. Self-concepts, attitudes, and values may show remarkable stability. Many conditions jointly determine the degree of consistency among cognitions, feelings, and action.[26] A person comes up with poverty situation lacks the competency and will for growth. Cursing the situation, hopelessness, worthlessness is the common feeling on the basis of self concepts. Inferiority complex and the lack of self esteem are the nature of the same personality.

Poverty and anti-social behavior              

            Data from a sample of 963, 10- to 12-year-old children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth were used to evaluate the parenting practices and environmental influences that explain the relation between poverty and antisocial behavior two years later. Results indicate that deviant peer pressure and neighborhood problems partially mediate the relation between poverty and young adolescent antisocial behavior. The parenting practices and environmental influences that predict antisocial behavior do not vary by the child's gender or race/ethnicity, and vary little by the child's age. Findings suggest that when environmental risk is high, authoritarian parenting strategies result in lower levels of antisocial behavior.

A personality disorder is characterized by chronic antisocial behavior and violation of the law and the rights of others.[27] Poverty has a tremendous effect on developing antisocial behavior. Emerging social violence, crimes and drug abuses are example for the same.

Poverty and Crime

            The research literature clearly demonstrates that children living in poverty are at a higher risk for engaging in delinquent behavior (e.g. Peterson and Bravo 2005; Pratt and Cullen 2005). The family context plays an important role in child outcomes. Some scholars have argued that poverty affects delinquency by affecting family processes. Research has shown that poverty increases family stress (Larzelere and Patterson 1990). Family stress, in turn, affects parent-child interactions (Hanson 1997; Patterson et al. 1989; Sampson and Laub 1993). Public assistance programs were designed to buffer some the negative effects of poverty; however, there has been little research examining how public assistance receipt affects the relationship between poverty and delinquency.[28]

Poverty, Family Stress & Parenting

The experience of long-term poverty affects a child’s personality development, through a family stress process in which poverty is considered to be one of the major factors. This causes family dysfunction, stress among caregivers and inadequate parenting.[29]

Many factors contribute to family poverty including underemployment and unemployment. Some may ‘inherit’ poverty because of being born into a particular social group defined by race, class and location. Families who constitute the ‘working group’ may have one or both parents working at or near the minimum wage. 

            The findings of a research done by Zaslow & Eldred (1998)[30] provide strong support for the view that parenting is important to children’s development, as are influences from the children’s larger social context.

The ‘Family Stress Model’ (Conger et al. 2000) proposes that the experience of poverty is one of the more important factors that can put severe strains on spousal relationships, bring about feelings of depression and increasing family dysfunction.[31] 

According to the ‘Family Stress Model’ family contributes to emotional distress (e.g. depression) and family dysfunction. Family distress causes problems in the relationship between adults that are, in turn, linked to less effective parenting – a complex notion that involves insufficient surveillance, lack of control over the child’s behavior, lack of warmth and support, inconsistency, and displays of aggression or hostility by parents or older siblings.[32]

Overall there could be following three impacts of poverty on parents and children (McClelland, 2000):

1. Hardship and Stress. 2. Isolation and exclusion. 3. Longer-term impacts as adults.[33]

i Hardship & stress

People with inadequate income typically  give accounts of their difficulties in meeting basic costs, including struggling to pay for food, accommodation, clothing, education, health care, utilities, transport and recreation and trying to balance competing demands.[34]

The harmful impact of poverty on parents and children comes from the stress and alienation connected with having a very low income; the continual juggling of finances, financial uncertainty in some cases and very often the sense of being different and less worthwhile. For children, the impact of stress and unhappiness may be direct and indirect through the parents’ experiences and behavior.[35]

ii Isolation & exclusion

Homelessness is perhaps the extreme manifestation of isolation and stress for children arising from the combination of low income and housing difficulties. In poor families children could feel homelessness due to lack of parents’ attention. It is because poverty is blocking the ways of parents to perform the role of good parenting. In most of the poor families, usually both mother and father work for the survival. 

Taylor & Macdonald (1998) found that at age six, the children in families of low incomes had more isolated lives in that they were significantly less likely than other children to: • Live in a good neighborhood. • Play with friends away from school. • Be involved in sport and music.  • Be involved in any formal activities. • Go on holiday.[36]

iii Longer-term impacts

Family poverty and low socio-economic status are consistently related to poorer school performance and low school retention rates. Young people from low socio-economic backgrounds are early school leavers. Those with low achievement at school are more likely to be unemployed, out of the labor market, in part-time employment (McClelland et al. 1998). In extremely poor conditions parents willingly induce their children in to the labor market which exposes children to many risks, such as sexual and physical abuse.[37] 

Exploitation / Oppression and unemployment in society

At the larger social level exploitation and oppression can be seen worldwide. Long period of unemployment can be hazardous to both physical and mental health. A definite correlation exists between unemployment and the rise of such healthy problems as alcoholism, hypertension, depression, apathy, family tensions, child abuse, stomach ailments, and other stress related disease.[38] Social and economic exploitation and oppression by a few people by denying minimum wages put them in utter poverty. This is far reaching effect on the stability of the society. Children of lower income people are worse affected by malnutrition and dynamism of growth in all spheres of life.

Urban poverty, ethnicity, and personality development

There are multiple factors which contribute to the development of the individual's personality. Many of these factors have been amply discussed in traditional theories of personality formation. An area that has been neglected in these discussions has been the role that poverty and ethnic and cultural factors may have in this regard.[39] People with fine education and financial resources used to move to urban areas where as the people with low income and resources stay same in rural areas and do their agricultural works.

Evidence from a long-term study of a representative sample of low-income individual’s shows that poverty is very widespread but not usually very persistent, and that the characteristics of the persistently poor do not conform to the conventional wisdom. Furthermore, the economic status of the poor does not appear to have been caused by psychological dispositions. Intergenerational data from the same study show generally weak links between the poverty or welfare status of parents and that of their children.[40]      

Conclusion

            Poverty has a devastating effect on personality. Poverty is a harmful tool to exclude a personality from its ultimate cherished goal of growth and change. Poverty influences a personality from a mother’s womb onwards. It affects each life stages of a person’s personality according to different circumstances. Personality causes for personality disorders including anxiety disorder, depression, psychosomatic disorders, suicidal tendencies etc. Poverty has to be handled with gentle care because if segregate life in to a corner from its freedom and growth. Just and equitable distribution of national recourses will help to resolve poverty to large extent. Socialistic planning like five year plans conceived by the government of India helped a lot to ameliorating the poverty situations in rural and the tribal India. Poverty can be sorted out through planning life gently and finding positives in present available resources and hard work.

---

Notes

[1]‘Poverty’ Oxford English Dictionary.(Delhi: Oxford University Press,2000)536

[2] An online encyclopedia from Microsoft.

[3] http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?lextype=3&search=poverty

[4]  Ram Ahuja., Social Problems in India.(New Delhi: Rawat Publications,1997)27-69

[5] Ibid.

[6] The last approach explains the poverty in terms of relativity and inequality. Where as the first two definitions refer to the economic concept of absolute poverty, the third definition views it as a social concept, that is, in terms of the share of the total national income received by those at the bottom. For more read: Ram Ahuja., Social Problems in India.(New Delhi: Rawat Publications,1997)27-69

[7] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/3323752/abstract

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Below_Poverty_Line_(India)

[9]License Raj refers to the elaborate licenses, regulations and the accompanying red tape that were required to set up and run business in India between 1947 and 1990. The License Raj was a result of India's decision to have a planned economy, where all aspects of the economy are controlled by the state and licenses were given to a select few. Corruption flourished under this system.

The labyrinthine bureaucracy often led to absurd restrictions - up to 80 agencies had to be satisfied before a firm could be granted a licence to produce and the state would decide what was produced, how much, at what price and what sources of capital were used.

India had started out in the 1950s with:  high growth rates, openness to trade and investment, a promotional state, social expenditure awareness and macro stability but ended the 1980s with: low growth rates, closure to trade and investment, a license-obsessed, restrictive state (License Raj), inability to sustain social expenditures and macro instability, indeed crisis.

 India: the economy. Published in 1998 by BBC

[10] http://www.fightpoverty.mmbrico.com/poverty/reasons.html

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] H.H.Barnette., “Exploitation and Oppression” Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling. Edited By. Rodney J.Hunter.(Nashville: Abingdon Press,2005)391-392.

[15] http://www.fightpoverty.mmbrico.com/poverty/reasons.html

[16] Ibid.

[17] Walter Mischel., Introduction to personality.(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc, 1971) 01

[18] D.Brokaw., “Character and Personality”, Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling. Edited By. Rodney J.Hunter.(Nashville: Abingdon Press,2005)136-137.

[19] Walter Mischel., Introduction to personality.(Sydney:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc,1971)225-424

[20] Poverty survival includes the urgency for going job to earn money for primary & secondary living needs, mother’s inability to meet the children needs through breast feeding due to the lack of proper nutrition to mother causing poverty, mother’s operational death, lack of time for affection, care and love influencing poverty etc. Walter Mischel., Introduction to personality.(Sydney:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc,1971)225-424

[21] (eg: parents, siblings, schoolmates, and teachers.) Walter Mischel., Introduction to personality.(Sydney:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc,1971)225-424

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid

[26] Ibid.

[27] http://www.answers.com/topic/antisocial-personality-disorder#ixzz1CPOQDEJL

[28] http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/0/1/6/5/p201655_index.html

[29] According to the World Bank estimates in 2003, there were 1.2 billion out of the developing world's 4.8 billion people living on $1 per day, while another 2.8 billion are living on less than $2 per day. 

[30] Zaslow, M. & Eldred, C. (1998) Better parenting may not be enough for children, American Psychological Association, APA Monitor, Volume 29, Number 11.

[31] Conger, R.D., K.J. Conger, G.H. Elder Jr., F.O.  Lorenz & R.L. Simons (1994) Economic stress, coercive family process and developmental problems of adolescents, Child Development, 65: 541 – 61, 1994. 

[32] Ibid.

[33] McClelland, A., Macdonald, F. & MacDonald, H. (1998)  Young people and labor market disadvantages: the situation of young people not in education or full-time work, Discussion Skills Forum, Australia’ youth: reality and risk, Sydney.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid

[36] ibid

[37] Ibid.

[38] H.H. Barnette, “Exploitation /Oppression”, Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling. Edited By. Rodney J.Hunter.(Nashville: Abingdon Press,2005)391-392.

[39] http://www.springerlink.com/content/u2x35034880203n3/

[40] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/3323752/abstract

Copyright and Use:

As a user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use according to fair use as defined by U.S, UK, India and international copyright law and as otherwise authorized under your respective ‘Praveen S.John’ (Blogger) subscriber agreement. No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling, reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a violation of copyright law. The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journal typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However, for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article. Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specific work for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered by your respective Praveen S.John’s subscriber agreement. For information regarding the copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available, or contact Praveen S.John to request contact information for the copyright holder(s).