Periodic Reporting for period 4 - EFFORT (Effort and Social Inequality: Advancing Measurement and Understanding Parental Origin Effects)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2024-02-29
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.
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.
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.