ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the content of the psychology of poverty (for the research period till 2019/pre-COVID-19). The chapter moves through the historical path of psychology’s problematic history when understanding and providing solutions to poverty. The discussion starts with the early psychological reductions for victim blaming, moving through personality deficit approaches and attributional research, critiquing these with discursive and contextual approaches. Modern cognitive and behavioural economic positions of a feedback loop and the need to intervene to protect people are critiqued again with contextual and political lenses. The chapter ends with the culmination of those contextual critiques to suggest how psychology, using social contextual analytical insights, can better bridge the gaps psychology often fills with dispositional fault, cognitive error, or irrationality. That contextual perspective is carried forward for the following review of qualitative research on poverty (Chapter 4) and the research presented in Chapters 5–8.
