The planning paradox: Poverty is linked to greater goal ambition and fewer plans, leading to lower goal progress

How does poverty affect people’s capacity to pursue their goals? Prevailing perspectives suggest lower socioeconomic status (SES) impairs goal achievement by reducing aspiration and weakening self-regulation. Across two preregistered studies with Colombian adults across the SES spectrum (total N = 1197), we challenge this view by documenting a planning paradox: compared to higher-SES counterparts, lower-SES individuals reported goals they perceived as more ambitious and longer-term, but were less likely to have concrete plans to achieve them. They also faced more circumstantial barriers where external conditions, not internal motivational conflicts, blocked goal progress. These findings are consistent with a structural perspective, which attributes SES differences in planning to environmental instability and informational constraints rather than cognitive overload. Poverty may not undermine self-regulation so much as reduce the effectiveness of planning in unstable contexts.