Thoughts on BS, Education and Welfare

 Behavioral Science and Education

Students face the toughest kind of decisions while in school: sacrifice leisure today to benefit from an investment in knowledge that may bring good things in the future. Does it make sense for a kid to patiently wait for a teacher to finish explaining something to a classmate that she already understood and can easily be found in a three-minute video on Youtube? Choices that involve outcomes in different time frames are hard due to our anxiety and the kind of ideas we hold about the future. 

As decision makers we do not have different tooling for hard and consequential decisions than for daily and seemingly less important ones, so tough decisions are good candidates for mistakes. Although we can recognize when a choice may have a lasting impact in our lives, many times we cannot assure better quality of reasoning in those moments. Our automatic way of deciding is always ready to push us to swiftly arrive at a “final decision” even when waiting and re-thinking may be a better alternative. Hard decisions are exhausting, and we usually experience a need to “get rid” of them. Children and adolescents may experience that feeling when choosing between leisure and studying: “I know that I am supposed to be preparing for that test, but for how long should I study to pass it?”. That is not a trivial decision and present bias, overconfidence, social norms, or loss aversion provide a shortcut for the “final decision” at the cost of a bias for less time studying.

As parents or educators, we must help children to choose wisely, and choice architecture offers a valid set of tools for that. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2021) in their “final” version of their groundbreaking book Nudge, offer a compelling argument in favor of these kind of interventions. They propose that we can be simultaneously paternalistic by looking for an improvement in the quality of others´ decisions, and libertarian as we preserve their freedom of choice in doing so.

Although teachers are supposed to aim for discipline in their classes and use incentives to guide their students, a libertarian paternalistic approach can bring more tools to the table. An example of this can be found in a work by Steven Levitt and colleagues (Levitt, S., List, J., Neckermann, S., and Sadoff, S., 2016). They describe how non-monetary incentives (a medal) can boost performance in a test as long as students get it immediately. The very same incentive loses its power when it is delayed some weeks. Present bias is partly responsible for that augmented anxiety, and teachers can take advantage of it by choosing smart choice architectures when grading.

Teachers and parents may also benefit from nudging in their own choices regarding education of the children. Teachers may gain influence by seeing themselves as choice architects of the decision context of their students. By acknowledging that children as decision makers do also have a dual system process, they may find new ways to improve their academic outcomes. In a similar way, parents can build context that guides their children along the healthy decision-making path. But it is not only children’s decisions that can be improved with nudging. Parents and teachers may also benefit from them. In a recent paper Philip Oreopulos (2020) builds a case in favor of nudging parents and teachers to improve student academic success.

However, before labeling a young student choosing another round on her favorite videogame instead of studying as an error that can be prevented with smart, we should acknowledge that it is not that easy to properly assess what is in fact an error. “Education prepares you to face the challenges of life and brings out the very best version of yourself”, one way or another almost every parent and teacher delivers this kind of message to their children. However, we should be careful with what we promise. Who will assess which is the “very best version of yourself”? A future self, looking at all the possible outcomes should be the only one able to judge such matters. But even if we have the time machine to ask them, those future selves are different after having effectively taken today decisions. As adults “nudging” in the direction of one specific decision, this means we are choosing one of those versions. That is a huge responsibility and should not be taken without hard questioning of the opinion of those children’s “future selves”. 

Although as adults we are right in acting in a paternalistic way when looking at children’s decisions regarding education, our views may gain some perspective if we give more room to reflect on welfare during school and the years following graduation.  In recent years welfare literature brought us instruments that help in bringing visibility to happiness and its determinants. Welfare is a complex construct but igniting the conversation with the aid of academic research and data coming from applied instruments, gives us the possibility to better understand how to improve our understanding about which are the best decisions for each student and how to help them achieve them.  

I firmly believe that Behavioral Economics, and in general the Behavioral Science field, can be a way to bring new ideas to the table and encourage teachers to find local solutions by keeping the ultimate purpose of education in focus: the student and their needs.

References

Levitt, S. D., List, J. A., Neckermann, S., & Sadoff, S. (2016). The behavioralist goes to school: Leveraging behavioral economics to improve educational performance. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 8(4), 183-219.

Oreopoulos, P. (2020). Promises and limitations of nudging in education.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Nudge. Yale University Press.