The Effect of Early-Childhood Education on Social Preferences

Cappelen, Alexander W.; List, John A.; Samek, Anya; Tungodden, Bertil

doi:10.1086/706858

Cited by 110 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Our findings are also relevant from a policy perspective: combining evidence on the labor market relevance of prosociality with recent evidence on its malleability 10 , 21 suggests prosociality as a promising target of policy interventions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

Prosociality predicts labor market success around the world

Kosse

Tincani

2020

Nat Commun

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A large literature points to the importance of prosociality for the well-being of societies and individuals. However, most of this work is based on observations from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, questioning the generalizability of these findings. Here we present a global investigation of the relation between prosociality and labor market success. Our analysis uses experimentally validated measures of prosociality and is based on about 80,000 individuals in 76 representative country samples. We show a sizable and robust positive relation between prosociality and labor market success around the world that does not systematically differ across continents or by countries’ economic development. These findings generalize the positive relation between prosociality and labor market success to a wide geographical context.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

Prosociality predicts labor market success around the world

Kosse

Tincani

2020

Nat Commun

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“…Previous studies have focused on short, priming-type interventions concerning adults in settings where between-group interactions are rare and measured outcomes are mostly limited to self-reported beliefs and do not involve any explicit interactions between groups (Broock-man andKalla, 2016, Adida et al, 2018). Finally, our study contributes to the growing literature on the development of socio-emotional skills by providing causal evidence on the malleability of perspective-taking ability in young children (Heckman et al, 2006, Deming, 2009, Heckman et al, 2013, Alan and Ertac, 2018, Alan et al, 2019, Cappelen et al, 2020, Eisner et al, 2020, Kosse et al, 2020.…”

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confidence: 69%

Building Social Cohesion in Ethnically Mixed Schools: An Intervention on Perspective Taking

Alan

Baysan

Gümren

et al. 2021

The Quarterly Journal of Economics

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We evaluate the impact of an educational program that aims to build social cohesion in ethnically mixed schools by developing perspective-taking ability in children. The program is implemented in Turkish elementary schools affected by a large influx of Syrian refugee children. We measure a comprehensive set of outcomes that characterize a cohesive school environment, including peer violence incidents, the prevalence of interethnic social ties, and prosocial behavior. Using randomized variation in program implementation, we find that the program significantly lowers peer violence and victimization on school grounds. The program also reduces the likelihood of social exclusion and increases interethnic social ties in the classroom. We find that the program significantly improves prosocial behavior, measured by incentivized tasks: treated students exhibit significantly higher trust, reciprocity, and altruism toward each other as well as toward anonymous out-school peers. We show that this enhanced prosociality is welfare improving from the ex post payoff perspective. We investigate multiple channels that could explain the results, including ethnic bias, impulsivity, empathetic concern, emotional intelligence, behavioral norms, and perspective taking. Children’s increased effort to take others’ perspectives emerges as the most robust mechanism to explain our results.

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“…Carroll, 1963), grit (e.g. Duckworth et al, 2007), intrinsic motivation, self-motivation, and other executive function skills (such as in Cunha et al, 2010;Gneezy et al, 2019;Kosse et al, 2020;Cappelen et al, 2020), to describe time preference, our metric is theoretically-driven, clearly defined, and quantifiable. Likewise, while aptitude, cognitive ability, and innate ability have been used to measure academic efficiency, we develop a theoretically-consistent metric that is easily obtained and correlates with key observables.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%