Aligning Measurement of Psychological Traits and Economic Preferences

Project Summary We propose a collaborative research project in psychology, child development, and behavioral economics investigating the comparability and predictive power of measures of human potential that are regularly used in these fields. Using data collected on common measures of personality traits, executive function (EF) skills, and economic preferences across multiple countries, we will apply rigorous statistical methodology to investigate the relationships among these attributes beginning in pre-adolescence and assess which dimensions best predict health, wellbeing, educational outcomes, wages, and workforce decisions. We will also examine the stability and malleability of child and adolescent traits, skills, and preferences across environments with different contexts and incentive structures. (1) We examine the commonality of traits, and (2) their uniqueness, and (3) the evolution of unique and common traits. We will examine additional measures beyond the traditional ones (for example Guanxi, a trait capturing sociability that is widely used in China) to examine their relationship with the standard measures, and whether they have additional predictive power. Personality traits, EF skills, and economic preferences in childhood and adolescence are important predictors of adult outcomes, including physical and mental health, educational attainment, and employment. Measures of these attributes, such as perseverance and time preference, are increasingly used to evaluate the impacts of childhood interventions, monitor progress in school, forecast health outcomes, and study economic and social inequality. However, little is known about how traits, skills, and preferences evolve and co-evolve across childhood and adolescence. This grant will support collaborative efforts to measure child and adolescent personality traits, EF skills, and economic preferences drawing on expertise from the Center for the Economics of Human Development (University of Chicago), the Educational Testing Service, the briq Institute on Behavior & Inequality (University of Bonn), the Institute of Child Development (University of Minnesota), and the Institute for Economic and Social Research (Jinan University). Using existing data combined with new data collection, we will explore the relationships across elicited trait, skill, and preference measures to determine the extent to which different measurement schemes capture common or distinct aspects of human differences, and if these relationships vary across cultures, gender, ethnicity, and race. Our analysis will standardize across the measures to account for factors that influence responses, leading to increased comparability. We will use our elicited measures and the latent factors underlying them to predict performance in school (e.g., absenteeism, grades, promotion, behavioral problems, graduation), health (e.g., physical, emotional, social), and wages, employment, and occupation. We will examine the stability and evolution of the elicited measures, the malleability of traits, skills, and preferences, the factors that predict these measures (including institutional and family background and parental influences on their children), and the correlates of stability and change throughout childhood and adolescence.