THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COSTS OF SEEKING HELP FOR FINANCIAL HARDSHIPS

Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Despite a wealth of evidence on the factors driving the ?supply side? of helping?when people give help and why?there is a comparative dearth on the ?demand side??when people ask for help and why. Violating the standard economic assumption of ?more resources are preferred to less,? evidence suggests that despite large benefits, services ranging from governmental welfare programs to tutoring programs are vastly underused. The proposed project seeks to explain why people fail to ask for help in the context of social services. Building on work in economics, psychology, and sociology, as well as our own pilot evidence, we hypothesize that in addition to standard economic costs of seeking help (such as time and effort expended on searching for services), there are also potent psychological costs (such as feelings of shame, failure, and indebtedness). These psychological costs, we argue, may be a first-order problem, inhibiting those in need from seeking help for their financial hardships, undermining the effectiveness of welfare policies, and slowing individuals? escape from poverty.In collaboration with a Pennsylvania social services agency specializing in housing assistance, we propose two studies to examine the role of psychological factors in help-seeking. The first study will identify the extent to which people delay seeking initial help for their financial hardships and what factors contributed to those delays. While correlational, it will provide evidence for the relative importance of a wide range of economic and psychological factors among a demographically diverse population of low-income adults and families.The second study, a randomized controlled trial, will use low-cost, scalable interventions to test the importance of two psychological factors. The population of interest will be people who initially failed to get help with the partner organization due to capacity constraints and are subsequently referred to an external service provider. We will randomize participants into one of three groups (a control group or one of two treatment groups) and test the extent to which different messages affect people?s willingness to follow through on the external referrals. One intervention will test the importance of people wanting to maintain a positive image of themselves, while the other will test the importance of people wanting to conform to social norms of not taking resources out of a system without also contributing to it.In addition to advancing our theoretical understanding of help-seeking and filling a critical gap in the literature, the results of these studies could have large policy implications. Should our hypotheses be upheld, they would suggest that incorporating the psychological costs of help-seeking into welfare policies may be a powerful tool in the fight against poverty. Not only can it increase people?s willingness to seek out potentially life-saving services, it can simultaneously improve psychological outcomes as well, relieving those in need from the painful dilemma of how to trade off their financial and psychological well-being.