UBC-DIBS Behavioural Insights Seminar
Friday, May 8
1-2pm Pacific
Register to attend on Zoom at https://bit.ly/DIBSseminar.
Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital
Supreet Kaur
University of California, Berkeley
This talk introduces “cognitive endurance”—the ability to sustain effortful thinking over time—as an underappreciated form of human capital that schooling can build. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, lower-income individuals exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the richer ones across a variety of field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches. Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we show that simply giving kids more time to practice sustained thinking (even via games with no academic content) reduces cognitive fatigue by 21% and raises grades by nearly 0.1 standard deviations—providing evidence of far transfer in high stakes outcomes. The findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage low-income children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity—pointing to a concrete, low-cost lever for intervention.
The UBC-DIBS Behavioural Insights Seminar series features researchers and practitioners sharing their field and lab projects using the behavioural and decision sciences to “nudge for good”. Recordings of past seminars are available on the BI wiki here. To subscribe or unsubscribe, email dibs@sauder.ubc.ca.