CEGA’s Psychology and Economics of Poverty Initiative Funds Nine New Studies
Researchers are applying insights from psychology and economics to address important questions related to global poverty
This post was written by CEGA Program Manager for Health & Psychology Kristina Hallez.
In a Fall 2020 funding round, CEGA’s Psychology and Economics of Poverty Initiative (PEP) awarded small grants ($5–25K) to nine new projects exploring the impact of poverty on psychological mechanisms that have downstream consequences for human health and well-being. Funded projects employ a range of methods, including in-home audio recordings, SMS messaging, lab-in-the-field exercises, and more. Some of these new projects delve into the effects of different cultural settings or prolonged shocks (like the COVID-19 pandemic) on child development and language acquisition; others explore the psychological channels through which stigma, bias, beliefs and social norms influence behavior and economic decision-making. Short descriptions of each project are included below, grouped by category:
Child development
- Using daily in-home speech recordings and surveys, Mahesh Srinivasan (UC Berkeley), Monica Ellwood-Lowe (UC Berkeley), Ruthe Foushee (University of Chicago) and Grace Horton (UC Berkeley) investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting parental well-being and interactions with children in the US.
- Working with naturalistic speech recordings from Tseltal Maya communities in Mexico, Ruthe Foushee (University of Chicago) is developing and validating culturally sensitive language assessments to test the presence of linguistic knowledge in infants exposed exclusively to overhead speech.
Stigma, bias, and beliefs
- Elizabeth Linos, Jessica Lasky-Fink, and Karalyn Lacey (all based at UC Berkeley) test whether reducing psychological costs associated with stigma increases the take-up of COVID-19 low-income housing assistance programs in Denver (US). They will measure medium- and longer-term consequences on financial and housing security, health outcomes and beliefs about government assistance programs among this population.
- Ieda Matavelli, Deivis Angeli, Pedro Pessoa and Fernando Secco (all based at the University of British Columbia) will carry out a field experiment exploring the stigma of having a home address based in Brazilian favelas and estimate its effects on job application decisions and interview performance.
- Luisa Cefala (UC Berkeley) will research whether Kenyan workers have biased memories of how much they worked and whether this affects their labor-seeking behavior in the future, to better understand the psychological mechanisms that may lead to poverty traps.
- Michael Schwalbe, Hazel Markus, and Catherine Thomas (all based at Stanford University) test whether a dignity affirmation intervention provided through text messages in the US increases psychosocial, health, and economic outcomes in the face of COVID-19.
Social norms and psychological traits
- Nicholas Swanson (UC Berkeley) will investigate the social norms that may cause small business owners in Zambia to feel pressure to hire their relatives as employees and whether business owners make different hiring decisions if their choices are not publicly observable.
- Through a combination of surveys and lab-in-the-field experiments in Bangladesh, Nina Buchmann(Stanford) explores the motivations behind domestic violence, by testing whether men use punishment to deter or respond to certain wife behaviors and whether violence is driven by financial or reputation concerns.
- Through a study with garment workers in Tanzania, Munir Squires (University of British Columbia) David Yang (Harvard), and Noam Yuchtman (London School of Economics) explore whether factory work can lead to the adoption of psychological traits prevalent among Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.
These projects are currently funded through Fall 2021. 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 2021 PEP convening event webpage for recordings of presentations. To stay connected to the growing community of practice through our Psychology and Economics of Poverty Slack channel, a forum for sharing interesting research, posing questions, and learning about conferences, workshops, funding and job opportunities.
