A new study by Cornell University neuroscientists suggests that the human brain is predisposed to value earning a living over saving.

“Fundamentally it comes down to this: Saving is less valuable to our brains, which devote less attentional resources to it,” said Adam Anderson, a Cornell associate professor of human development and co-author of the  study. “It’s more than a financial problem of making ends meet. Our brains find saving more difficult to attend to.”

To prove that point, the study created an experimental micro-economy in which test subjects had the choice of earning or saving money by responding to different colors signifying each opportunity. A timing perception task with the same colors measured the time that test subjects took to process colors as an indicator of how strong their desire was to earn and save.

Researchers found that the majority of test subjects did not treat savings as a priority, but instead as a goal that could be deferred indefinitely. “While we must earn before we can save, our brains may blind us to opportunities to save, in a way that fundamentally distorts our perceptions,” the researchers reported in their study.

Americans in particular are notoriously poor at saving money, according to a 2016 analysis of a Federal Reserve survey. According to the survey, the average American working-age couple has save only $5,000 for retirement, while 43 percent of working-age families have no retirement savings at all.

As of 2017, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, people were saving less than 3 percent of their personal disposable income, continuing a downward trend.

But there is hope for compulsive earners who cannot prioritize the importance of saving for their future.

Cornell researchers also reported that the human brain’s reflexive response to value earning more than saving can be countered through learning to do what does not come as naturally. “That’s the good news,” said Eve De Rosa, a Cornell associate professor of human development and a study co-author. “If you’ve learned it, you can unlearn it.”

Published July 20 in Nature Communications, the study's title is “Differential Temporal Salience of Earning and Saving.” The lead author of the study was Kesong Hu, a postdoctoral fellow in Anderson and De Rosa’s Affect and Cognition Lab.