A Ramadan Induced Scarcity Mindset

Every year, during the month of Ramadan, people of Muslim faith fast by not eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset. This is likely to have physiological and psychological consequences for the individuals who fast, as well as societal and economic impacts on the wider population. Here we investigate whether food is perceived as a scarce resource during a voluntary and temporally limited fast, and reminders of it can impair the fasters’ reaction time and accuracy on a test of cognitive control. Prior research shows that increasing the salience of a resource can influence cognitive performance in people who experience a profound scarcity of that resource. Using a repeated measure design in a sample of Ramadan fasters (N=190), we find that people who respond to food-related questions before taking a cognitive control test are slower and less accurate during Ramadan compared to after. Control participants who responded to nonfood- related questions did not differ significantly across time. Moreover, food-reminded fasters were slower than control fasters if the controls’ last meal had occurred within the past eight hours; beyond eight hours, both groups were indistinguishably slow. These results have implications for people who fast for religious, health, or dietary reasons, and for research on cognition under scarcity.