ABSTRACT
Poverty is a persistent social issue that policymakers have turned to psychology for help in addressing. This has spurred an upswing in research on the psychology of poverty over the past 15 years, leading to a maturing evidence base on how the conditions of resource scarcity and other forms of socioeconomic adversity shape decision-making and its underlying psychological mechanisms. This paper reviews this work, while arguing for an expansion in focus from the individual to the wider economic, cultural, and political forces that generate and sustain poverty in the first place. Drawing on perspectives from psychology, behavioral ecology, and political economy, it puts forward a socioecological psychology of poverty that articulates how the experience of socioeconomic adversity is shaped by the interplay of welfare institutions and related societal narratives, social policy design and implementation, and proximal material and social conditions.