Material incentives drive gender differences in cognitive effort among children

Academic performance relies on effort and varies by gender. However, it is not clear at what age nor under what circumstances gender differences in effort arise. Using behavioral real-effort measures from 806 fifth-grade students, we find no gender differences in cognitive effort in the absence of rewards. However, boys exert more effort than girls when materially incentivized. Adding a status incentive on top of material rewards does not further increase the gender gap. While boys achieve superior performance through more proactive control and faster reaction speed, we find no gender differences in overall accuracy. Girls' preferences for a more prudent approach pay off only when reactive control is elicited. These findings are robust to controlling for key personality traits and cognitive ability (fluid intelligence). The results have important implications for understanding gender divides in education and learning

Social Inequality in Children’s Cognitive Effort and the Moderating Role of Incentives

Cognitive effort is essential to equality of opportunity and meritocracy. However, sociological theories of how effort relates to social inequality are scarce and partial, while available empirical measures of effort are unreliable and lack validity. We contribute to social stratification scholarship both theoretically and empirically by (i) elaborating a synoptic account of how socioeconomic status (SES) affects cognitive effort, i.e., the mobilization of mental resources for task performance, (ii) developing a novel research design for measuring effort using reliable behavioral measures of effort and varying incentive conditions, and (iii) presenting evidence based on this laboratory design featuring 1,360 fifth-grade students. We theorize that greater material abundance and lower environmental threat reduce the subjective costs of exerting effort for higher-SES children, while greater autonomy and parental support give them greater intrinsic effort dispositions than lower-SES children. In contrast, we posit that lower-SES children have greater extrinsic effort dispositions due to higher marginal benefits. Our empirical results are supportive of these expectations. We find that the SES difference in effort is largest when incentives are absent, but this difference decreases notably when material incentives are introduced. In sum, SES differences in effort are surprisingly modest in size and contingent on incentives.This research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 758600)