New studies seek greater understanding of the psychological and cognitive effects of poverty

This post was written by CEGA Program Manager for Health & Psychology Kristina Hallez.

Credit: Prashanth Pinha via Unsplash

In summer 2022, CEGA’s Psychology and Economics of Poverty Initiative (PEP) funded twelve new projects that investigate the psychological and cognitive effects of poverty, and subsequent impacts on health, economic outcomes, and child development. In the largest PEP funding round to date, ten graduate student-led teams and two faculty-led teams were awarded funds (ranging in size from $5–25K) to carry out field and lab-in-the-field experiments, link new survey data with existing administrative records, and leverage existing large-scale interventions to learn more about the psychological mechanisms informing behavior, decision-making, and well-being outcomes in low-resource settings.

Brief descriptions with principal investigators listed first and links to project pages are included below:

Gender Bias

• Through a field experiment, Nina Buchmann and Carl Meyer (both at Stanford University) and Colin Sullivan (Purdue University) explore whether employers in Bangladesh discriminate benevolently across gender when hiring (e.g. not hiring women for night shifts citing concerns about safety) and how this affects employee skills and promotions across different industries.
• Jennifer Joan Martinez (UC Berkeley) will measure gender bias and stereotypes among secondary school teachers in Peru and how these can influence their students’ grades, as well as preferences and decisions around pursuing higher education.
• Ayodele Dada, Carol Dweck, and Catherine Thomas (Stanford University) will investigate whether an intervention in Nigeria that highlights education as an important intergenerational bequest from grandparents affects parents’ educational allocations to their girl and boy children.

Beliefs and Norms

• Using a randomized field experiment in Zambia, Nicholas Swanson (UC Berkeley) will analyze whether local business owners choose to hire relatives instead of non-relatives, depending on whether the information about the hiring is made public.
• Through pilot study work in Kenya and India, Luisa Cefala (UC Berkeley) aims to understand whether casual wage labor seekers hold motivated beliefs about their job search in order to preserve a positive self-image — and whether this negatively affects their job-seeking behaviors.
• In a field experiment in Brazil, Ieda Matavelli, Deivis Angeli, and Fernando Secco (all at University of British Columbia) test whether stigma associated with living in favelas (informal settlements) impacts job seekers’ application decisions and performance on job interviews.
• Catherine Thomas (Stanford University), Shinobu Kitayama, and Tong Suo (both at University of Michigan) will compare psychological tendencies in motivation, cognition, self-concept, and emotion across global contexts using lab-in-the-field experiments.
• By connecting rich administrative data with original primary survey data, Becky Cardinali (UC Berkeley) will investigate whether knowing their families’ relative wealth level affects the aspirations and friendship networks of teenagers in Colombia.

Cognition, Mental Health and Well-being

• Using data from an ongoing randomized control trial, CEGA affiliated professor Michael Carter, Marcos Martínez-Sugastti (both at UC Davis), and José Molinas-Vega (Instituto Desarrollo, Asunción) will analyze the potential psychological spillovers of the Paraguayan graduation program Tenonderã.
• CEGA affiliated professor Tamma Carleton (UC Santa Barbara) and Jingyuan Wang (Northwestern University) will examine the link between climate change and suicide rates, using a globally-comprehensive dataset from 183 countries, to identify how higher temperatures may impact mental health.
• To understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected parenting in the US, Monica Ellwood-Lowe, Mahesh Srinivasan, and Grace Horton (all at UC Berkeley) and Ruthe Foushee (University of Chicago) will explore daily surveys and at-home audio recordings from caregivers with toddlers about their mental and emotional well-being, as well as levels of child-directed speech.
• Through a lab-in-the-field experiment with the Busara Center in Kenya, Flavio Malagutti and Lei Yue (both at UC Santa Barbara) will test whether cash payments in low-income settings may have an immediate impact on cognitive function.

These projects are currently funded through summer 2023. We will share updates and findings as they become available.

By supporting exploratory work by graduate students and larger-scale projects by faculty, PEP seeks to better understand how poverty affects our mental maps and our decisions, a crucial step for informing compassionate and impactful interventions. To learn more about research on the psychology and economics of poverty, visit the 2022 PEP convening event webpage. To stay connected to the growing community of practice through our PEP Slack channel, a forum for sharing interesting research, posing questions, and learning about conferences, workshops, funding, and job opportunities.