Improving Gender and Immigrant Outcomes through the Social Malleability of Attitudes: Randomized Interventions on Peer Interactions in an Educational Setting

ongoing

This project studies the causal role of peer interactions and the nature of the classroom environment in the formation of individual beliefs, attitudes and non-cognitive skills in childhood, with a view towards (1) mitigating gender gaps in choices and outcomes, (2) improving attitudes towards immigrants and promoting integration, (3) improving achievement outcomes. To this end, the project will design randomized interventions on social interactions in the classroom, that exogenously manipulate (i) exposure to peers (randomizing gender and ethnicity combinations), (ii) the setting in which the interaction takes place (cooperative vs. competitive). The conjecture is that particular types of peer interaction (e.g. cooperative work) can permanently shift both individual preferences and attitudes toward others, and lead to contagion of non-cognitive skills. The interventions will be embedded into a novel extracurricular program to be designed around teaching “coding”, and” and will be implemented across a large set of elementary schools in Istanbul, for the duration of a semester. The project will utilize an interdisciplinary methodology that involves collecting a large set of outcome measures through novel incentivized experiments, questionnaires, and neural measurements. Impact of different types of peer interactions and a cooperative vs. competitive classroom culture on attitudes towards gender and immigrants, individual preferences and non-cognitive skills, creativity, aspirations and achievement will be measured both in the short- and the longer-run, in an entirely new social context. Comprehensive baseline data on individual, family and classroom characteristics will allow us to study heterogeneous effects and potential mechanisms. The results will provide inputs for how the educational environment can be designed early on, to build a culture that promotes gender equality, cultivates positive attitudes towards immigrants, and improves achievement outcomes.