Effort and Social Inequality: Advancing Measurement and Understanding Parental Origin Effects

Project Information

EFFORT

Grant agreement ID: 758600

DOI

10.3030/758600

Project closed

EC signature date 9 November 2017

Start date 1 March 2018

End date 29 February 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 572,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 572,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III DE MADRID
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - EFFORT (Effort and Social Inequality: Advancing Measurement and Understanding Parental Origin Effects)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Intergenerational social mobility has long been a hot topic in public and scholarly debates. The fact that children from privileged social origins enjoy considerable advantages over children from poorer backgrounds clashes with widespread notions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity. In a meritocratic society, success in life should arguably depend on ability and effort. Yet, while ample knowledge exists about the distribution of ability, little is known about the distribution of effort within the population. Soundly established empirical facts about the relationship between social origins and effort are few and far between. As a result, effort has remained an elusive concept. The project thus pursued the following goals:
1. To ascertain and document the degree of differences in children’s effort provision by parental socioeconomic background.
2. To establish to what extent these effort differences between children of different social origins are the consequence of (a) the intergenerational inheritability of effort from parents to their children, and (b) varying motivations and differential susceptibility to various incentives.
3. To identify the best methods to measure effort and to find out what kind of biases hamper the validity or reliability of various measurement techniques routinely employed in different scientific disciplines.
Effort is conceived here as the extent to which finite cognitive resources are mobilized for task performance. In short, it refers to the act of ‘trying hard’. Within this conceptual framework, the project investigated how individuals from different social backgrounds differ in the effort they invest in order to obtain goals that are conducive to socioeconomic attainment.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Management (WP1): Management of project located at three research institutions and involving more than 20 researchers.
Real-effort Group Experiments (WP2): Completed the planned data collection, with over 750 children participating in laboratory experiments in Madrid and over 500 children in Berlin. Additionally, more than 200 parents participated in online experiments. This comprehensive dataset allows for the rigorous study of intergenerational transmission.
Pupillometry Experiments (WP3): Successfully finalized pupillometry experiments with children and parents, collecting data from 100 sessions. These dyadic pupillometry data provide a novel source for cross-validation of effort measurement methods.
Research Papers (WP4): Produced several papers utilizing secondary data sets, e.g. using an Australian longitudinal data and PISA.
Cross-Cutting Activities(WP5): Conducted research into methodological and cross-country comparative issues. Project webiste and Twitter account. Organization of one interdisciplinary symposium, one final academic conference, and three dissemination workshops that are available on Youtube.
Overall, the EFFORT project successfully completed its data collection objectives, overcame obstacles such as school closures during the pandemic, and produced valuable research outputs across various substantive domains.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This research is groundbreaking in at least three ways: a) by being the first sociological study to make use of cutting-edge methodologies of effort measurement developed in adjacent disciplines, pushing the frontier of knowledge on social mobility; b) by collecting the first reliable large-scale data on multiple measures of effort, changing the way effort is operationalized and thought about in various disciplines; c) by providing evidence that shall impact ongoing debates on meritocracy and equality of opportunity, thus helping to improve public policy and educational practices.

The central study of the project makes the following key contributions: we contribute to social stratification theory by developing a synoptic account of how socioeconomic status (SES) affects effort dispositions, and we present novel data on a reliable, behavioral measure of effort in 1,300 fifth-grade students. Overall, we find a positive association between parental socio-economic status and children's cognitive effort. However, the magnitude of this gap is surprisingly modest. Moreover, the effect of social origin on effort is largest in the unincentivized condition and shrinks when effort is extrinsically motivated. This theoretically grounded empirical account of how material scarcity shapes cognitive effort under different incentives represents a significant step forward in the scientific understanding of the relationship between social structure and individual merit.

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