• Education decisions often involve current costs and greatly delayed benefits. Some decisions are made by “agents” – parents and teachers – on behalf of their “principals,” the students.
• Many education decisions – such as whether to drop out of school or go to college – are not regular, everyday situations where feedback allows people to adapt to something tolerably optimal over time.
• Can we be confident that education decisions are well-made? Evidence suggests high returns to more education. The list of potential behavioral biases influencing education decisions is long: self-control shortcomings, limited attention, loss aversion, default effects, social norms, underconfidence… Recall John Stuart Mill: "Those who most need to be made wiser and better,
usually desire it least, and if they desired it, would be incapable of finding
the way to it by their own lights."
• Perhaps people can be nudged in ways that will improve their choices – and improve them from their own point of view.
• The targets of nudges can be young scholars, their parents, or their teachers.
• The authors find 122 studies of field implementations of nudges in education.
• Opt-in v. opt-out text messages to parents: only 7.8% opt-in, but only 3.5% opt out. Further, outcomes (grades, staying in school) improve with the opt-out default.
• Framing financial aid as a tuition waiver versus a loan: the waivers steer a lot more law school grads to public interest work. Monetary transfers to families can be framed as being for education, and administered through schools.
• Mixed results have been reported from framing grades as losses (as in Shrader, Wooten, White, et al., “Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion”).
• Trying to take advantage of peer group effects is tricky, and sometimes counterproductive. Social comparison nudges can be both informational and motivational – and they can backfire.
• Intermediate assignments and deadlines seem to often raise grades.
• Self-imposed specific task-based goals also seem helpful, along with reminders of the goal. Unrealistically high goals are demotivating.
• Reminders to parents about their children’s education often seem helpful, too – likewise with providing informative updates to parents.
• Information provision about the returns to schooling seems to have some purchase in developing countries.
• “Boosting” skills like grit and goal-setting holds some hope for improved educational outcomes.
• Prizes: “The public can encourage the acquisition of those most essential parts of education by giving small premiums, and little badges of distinction, to the children of the common people who excel in them.” (Adam Smith) But the older the children, the less effective the prize nudge, and (like social comparisons), prizes can crowd out internal motivations.
• Growth mindset and social belonging nudges seem to work OK…
• Nudging will only overcome a binding constraint for a (small?) subset of students.
• In general, the long-term effects of nudgication remain unknown.
Malte Friese, David D. Loschelder, Karolin Gieseler, et al., “Is Ego
Depletion Real? An Analysis of Arguments.” Personality and Social
Psychology Review, published online, March 29, 2018.
• The ego depletion hypothesis maintains that self-control is a construct that applies across (essentially?) all domains…
• …and the exertion of self-control increases the chance of a failure of self-control in a subsequent (temporally proximate) task.
• The standard experimental test for ego depletion is to conduct two consecutive self-control tasks. Ego depletion holds that folks who were induced to exert more control on the first task will show relatively low self-control on the second task.
• The ego depletion literature frequently goes beyond the “depletion” being induced by self-control; any effortful behavior, including IKEA shopping, might lead to a depleted state and lessened self-control.
• Some meta-analyses of the ego depletion literature conclude that the average effect might be zero; a preregistered large-scale replication of a previous ego depletion study also found a zero average effect.
• Standard depletion-inducing exercises include variations on “e-crossing” and the Stroop test.
Do these manipulations really work?
• Journals traditionally have not been as interested in publishing null results than publishing articles that find statistically significant results.
Researchers presumably respond to this situation by not bothering to write up and submit experiments that produce null results.
Are the hundreds of published articles that find ego depletion matched or overmatched by countless unpublished studies that found no impaired self-control?
• Another way that researchers might respond to the (perceived?) difficulty in publishing null results is to ensure that they do not get null results. One way to do that is to run many different empirical specifications (of a regression, say), but only report the “best” one. If you do this, the usual tests for statistical significance are meaningless. (See Shiny Apps p-hacker.)
• We don’t see many studies with reverse depletion effects, and if the truth were that the effect is null, we might(?) see as many negative as positive studies.
• The unpublished studies might have to be legion to completely “offset” the many positive studies: that is, the truth might well be a positive effect (but of what size?)
• Don’t we see evidence of ego depletion in everyday life?
• The solution lies in better science! Pre-register studies; increase sample sizes; use improved controls; report all results; collaborate with your intellectual opponents; develop theoretical understandings; check the quality of manipulations.
• Friese et al. suggest that the burden of proof on the existence of ego depletion is now on the proponents of the phenomenon.
Itamar Simonson and Ran Kivetz, "Bringing (Contingent) Loss Aversion Down to Earth — A Comment on Gal & Rucker’s Rejection of 'Losses Loom Larger Than Gains,'" Journal of Consumer Psychology 28(3): 517-522, July 2018.
• The articles outlined in the two previous posts are part of a "Research Dialogue"; Simonson and Kivetz's reply to Gal and Rucker, outlined here, is an element of the same dialogue.
• Gal and Rucker are right in that loss aversion is neither as firmly established nor as universal as is typically thought. Nonetheless, their retention paradigm is not convincing evidence of an endowment effect sans loss aversion, and they underplay some of the strongest evidence in favor of loss aversion: people demonstrate significant aversion to a risky but highly favorable (in expected value terms) bet, when opposed to a riskless gain (or the status quo) that offers much less in expected value. People routinely turn down 50-50 bets that pay $200 if heads and lose $100 if tails.
• “[T]he question relevant at the present time for our field is not whether loss aversion occurs on average (we think it does), but what factors moderate its presence and magnitude, and relatedly, what are its boundaries [page 518]?”
• Much of the evidence for the endowment effect (like the unwillingness to trade mugs for candy bars or vice versa) is consistent with plausible, non-loss-aversion explanations, such as the awkwardness in coming to an agreement for trivial trades. But the retention paradigm is not very convincing as new evidence against loss aversion, because of the highly artificial settings that arise in trying to reframe the retention of something you own as an active choice.
• In many circumstances, loss aversion does seem to be part of what is going on with endowment effects, even if other mechanisms, such as transaction costs, also are at play. Losses do tend to loom larger than gains, but this is a tendency, one contingent on other factors, and not a universal truth.
• As Gal and Rucker (2018) note, the excessive commitment to loss aversion might crowd out research that can identify other factors that drive decision making.
E. Tory Higgins and Nira Liberman, "The Loss of Loss Aversion: Paying Attention to Reference Points," Journal of Consumer Psychology 28(3): 523-532, July 2018.
• The Gal and Rucker loss aversion article outlined in the previous post was part of a "Research Dialogue"; Higgins and Liberman's reply, outlined here, is an element of the same dialogue.
• Higgins and Lieberman agree with Gal and Rucker: the empirical support for loss aversion is not as strong as its reputation would suggest. Loss aversion is not universal. The more general (than loss aversion) notion of prospect theory – that “reference points increase people’s sensitivity to objective changes in value [p. 523]” – is still viable, however.
• Losses and gains in prospect theory are judged relative to some reference point, which often is taken to be the status quo. If the reference point is not the status quo, however, then gains (relative to the status quo) need not be less powerful than losses, even if that loss-aversion-style result would be case were the status quo the relevant reference point. Further, multiple reference points can be at play at any one time.
• Reference points tend to be outcomes which attract our attention. As a result, we are more sensitive to changes around those points than from changes elsewhere. But this increased sensitivity need not be asymmetric, need not involve loss aversion: sensitivity to either gains or losses or both can increase around references points.
• A second suggestion is that a relevant reference point when judging an outcome is what might have happened instead, the chief counterfactual; gains or losses relative to that alternative will take on intensified value. To just make a train is more enjoyable than making it easily, and to just miss it is more painful than to be much too late. Again, this approach does not suggest the sort of asymmetry that loss aversion requires.
• Reference points such as goals – 10,000 steps per day – might suggest loss aversion: step 10,000 is worth a lot more than step 10,001 – but, Higgins and Lieberman argue, goals as reference points need not involve loss aversion. Many market-based goals have built-in incentives that are more sensitive above the goal – for instance, an increased percentage of royalties from book sales – than below the goal.
• In long-term pursuits, dual reference points can be at play: the starting position might be most salient early in the process, but the ultimate goal takes on more prominence as the pursuit unfolds. Recall that Gal and Rucker suggest that what is taken to be evidence of loss aversion in the literature often can be explained by an inaction bias, where no loss aversion is at play. For long-term pursuits, the “action” alternative is the one for which this dual reference point view seems most apt, and the additional reference point (the goal) can be the source of a greater sensitivity in valuation from changes in the action alternative than in the inaction alternative.
• Some people (the “promotion-focused”) might concentrate on progress, and others (the “prevention-focused”) might concentrate on avoiding losses. Even if the status quo is the same for both individuals, they compare it with different alternative reference points. For the promotion-focused, the status quo is a loss relative to the desired progress; for the prevention-focused, the status quo is a gain relative to the feared worsening.
• If a prevention-focused person found herself below the status quo, she might choose risky strategies if they are her only hope of restoring the status quo. Promotion-focused people, alternatively, starting from below the status quo, will not feel all that motivated to regain the status quo (both are losses, given the reference points at work), but will be more motivated to go from the status quo to a better point. This story, for which there is empirical support, is not consistent with standard prospect-theory-style loss aversion. That is, Gal and Rucker are right, in that the psychological evaluation of negative events (losses) are not always greater than the evaluation of equivalent gains, and people are not always more motivated by the threat of losses than by the prospect of gains.
