Giving cash directly to people in extreme poverty has been proven effective again and again, by study after study. But, this solution often provokes visceral reactions in people, as it runs contrary to the values in society—that people should earn their money, and anything else is unfair.

This fetishization of self-reliance, however, is only one part of why people chafe at giving money directly to those in extreme poverty. A more common refrain: They’ll squander the money on booze, cigs, and drugs. However, it’s just not true.

In the study “Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods,” researchers David K. Evans of the World Bank and Anna Popova of Stanford University show this assumption to be false by examining spending on “temptation goods” like alcohol and cigarettes after cash transfers to people in extreme poverty. Their findings showed that when given cash, the consumption of these temptation goods can actually go down.

Previous studies on the efficacy of cash transfer programs to poor communities focused on recipients’ well-being—looking at increased education and consumption as measurements, not whether the money was spent on vice.

The results of Evans’ and Popova’s research and analysis are global in scope, using 19 studies from around the world. “Almost without exception, studies find either no significant impact or a significant negative impact of [cash transfers] on expenditures on alcohol and tobacco,” they write.

Explaining this isn’t so difficult, it turns out. When money is transferred with strings attached, it cannot be used on temptation goods—it’s earmarked for things like education, health, and other betterment investing. But even when there aren’t any strings attached, the money motivates people to redirect money they would spend on alcohol, for instance, to other things.

“By giving households sufficient cash at one time to open a small retail business, cash transfers create the opportunity to invest cash that might otherwise be spent in small doses on temptation items,” write Evans and Popova. To put it another way and paraphrase Warren Buffett, the utility and personal value of money changes depending on how much you have. Additionally, the programs’ messaging about how the money should be used is stressed—a strategy that appears to be successful.

The results have been similar for GiveDirectly, a top rated charity by Give Well that facilitates cash transfers. “The more than 50,000 extremely poor families GiveDirectly has transferred cash to are an example of what this research shows: that myths about the poor being irresponsible, lazy, and welfare queens are dead false,” Max Chapnick, a spokesperson at GiveDirectly, told Yahoo Finance. “Maybe the reason we expect the poor to spend cash grants on alcohol is that some of us might, but turns out they have more pressing needs to worry about.”

Why do we think everyone will buy booze and drugs?

It’s not hard to understand where that thinking comes from: Alcoholism and drug abuse, especially in urban poverty is very visible. The study didn’t get into where these assumptions come from but the authors have some ideas.

“Let’s say you are a Kenyan policymaker and you took a trip to a slum for a few hours. It’s certainly possible that you might see an intoxicated poor person,” Evans told Yahoo Finance. “Of course, seeing that person doesn’t tell you anything about how often poor people are intoxicated or whether there is a causal relationship, but it’s the kind of image that may stand out in your mind and lends itself to a simple narrative.”

Those perceptions are powerful, but there’s probably even more going on, something called the “Self-Serving Bias,” Evans says. It’s essentially when people overestimate their own roles in their success—ignoring the “good draw” they may have received at birth. “A complementary narrative is that poor people are poor because of bad choices,” he says. And again, it comes back to visibility. “If you met or heard about a given poor person who had an alcohol problem, it’s then easy to attribute their poverty to that and generalize. It feeds into a narrative that I’m well-off largely because of my choices, and they are poor largely because of theirs, and here’s an obvious choice that I saw a poor person making.”