Only some people also reported trade-off thinking, volunteering such thoughts as, “What do I have to give up to buy it?” The people who asked themselves these questions were disproportionately poor. The poor reported trade-off thinking almost twice as often as the better off (75 percent vs. 40 percent). This was a striking difference, especially since the income cutoff we used was at best a crude proxy for scarcity. Some of those whom we classified as well off might well have been experiencing scarcity—for example, some were surely burdened by mortgage payments, credit card debt, college
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