Throughout our lives, we often encounter situations where our efforts lead to either success or failure, influencing our future paths. These situations prompt individuals to pursue goals or aspirations, which, in the economic context, serve as reference points dividing feelings of success and failure. Aspirations, among various factors, significantly shape outcomes such as educational attainment, occupation, and income. The study of the capacity to aspire and associated aspirational biases has become a focal point for economists, particularly in understanding aspirations failures among the poor due to external constraints. Our aim is to provide empirical evidence on the effects of success and failure on aspirations, as well as aspirations failure, in different contexts.
Within the project, the primary objective is to investigate how cultivating a success-oriented environment can alleviate aspiration biases. This overarching goal unfolds into two specific objectives: examining how exposure to failure or success environments explains and enforces or reduces aspirational biases across different cultural settings and developing interventions to counteract aspirational biases.
Our main hypothesis posits that exposure to a success environment leads to increased aspirations and reduced aspirational biases. We contribute to the literature by delving into the effects of past outcomes on aspirations, employing a novel incentivized experimental approach to elicit aspirations and assess the impact of success or failure on aspirations and aspirations failure in diverse cultural settings.
The project's contributions to understanding aspiration formation are evident through a series of three experiments. The initial experiment, conducted electronically across three countries with over 3600 participants, revealed that failure significantly diminishes aspirations, while success has relatively weak positive effects.
The second experiment, focusing on undergraduate students in Slovakia during a sports racing event, echoed the negative impact of failure on aspirations, with success exhibiting weaker positive effects. Intriguingly, gender differences surfaced, with male students being more sensitive to failure and female students exhibiting greater responsiveness to success.
Concluding the series, a long-term intervention with approximately 2000 primary school students failed to indicate a meaningful impact of providing positive feedback on children's aspirations in a national math test.
In essence, our project significantly advances the understanding of aspiration formation, unveiling nuanced effects across diverse populations and settings, contributing valuable insights into the intricate relationship between success, failure, and aspirations.
