Jon M. Jachimowicz

Community trust reduces myopic decisions of low-income individuals

Significance More than 1.5 billion people worldwide live in poverty. Even in the United States, 14% live below the poverty line. Despite many policies and programs, poverty remains a domestic and global challenge; the number of US households earning less than

Why grit requires perseverance and passion to positively predict performance

2/d nearly doubled in the last 15 y. One reason why the poor remain poor is their tendency to make myopic decisions. With reduced temporal discounting, low-income individuals could invest more in forward-looking educational, financial, and social activities that could alleviate their impoverished situation. We show that increased community trust can decrease temporal discounting in low-income populations and test this mechanism in a 2-y field intervention in rural Bangladesh through a low-cost and scalable method that builds community trust. Why do the poor make shortsighted choices in decisions that involve delayed payoffs? Foregoing immediate rewards for larger, later rewards requires that decision makers (i) believe future payoffs will occur and (ii) are not forced to take the immediate reward out of financial need. Low-income individuals may be both less likely to believe future payoffs will occur and less able to forego immediate rewards due to higher financial need; they may thus appear to discount the future more heavily. We propose that trust in one’s community—which, unlike generalized trust, we find does not covary with levels of income—can partially offset the effects of low income on myopic decisions. Specifically, we hypothesize that low-income individuals with higher community trust make less myopic intertemporal decisions because they believe their community will buffer, or cushion, against their financial need. In archival data and laboratory studies, we find that higher levels of community trust among low-income individuals lead to less myopic decisions. We also test our predictions with a 2-y community trust intervention in rural Bangladesh involving 121 union councils (the smallest rural administrative and local government unit) and find that residents in treated union councils show higher levels of community trust and make less myopic intertemporal choices than residents in control union councils. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of domestic and global policy interventions to help the poor make decisions that could alleviate poverty.

The critical role of second-order normative beliefs in predicting energy conservation

Significance Grit has captured the public imagination and crept into educational policy throughout the United States. However, because prior studies linking grit and performance are beset by contradictory evidence, commentators increasingly state that grit is overhyped. We propose that the inconsistency between grit’s initial promise and its subsequent lack of empirical support has occurred because grit’s measurement has not matched its definition. Although grit is defined as the combination of perseverance and passion, its measurement has focused on perseverance and has not adequately captured passion. In a metaanalysis of 127 studies and two field studies, we show that passion is a key component of grit. The current theory and results suggest that perseverance without passion isn’t grit, but merely a grind. Prior studies linking grit—defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals—to performance are beset by contradictory evidence. As a result, commentators have increasingly declared that grit has limited effects. We propose that this inconsistent evidence has occurred because prior research has emphasized perseverance and ignored, both theoretically and empirically, the critical role of passion, which we define as a strong feeling toward a personally important value/preference that motivates intentions and behaviors to express that value/preference. We suggest that combining the grit scale—which only captures perseverance—with a measure that assesses whether individuals attain desired levels of passion will predict performance. We first metaanalyzed 127 studies (n = 45,485) that used the grit scale and assessed performance, and found that effect sizes are larger in studies where participants were more passionate for the performance domain. Second, in a survey of employees matched to supervisor-rated job performance (n = 422), we found that the combination of perseverance, measured through the grit scale, and passion attainment, measured through a new scale, predicted higher performance. A final study measured perseverance and passion attainment in a sample of students (n = 248) and linked these to their grade-point average (GPA), finding that the combination of perseverance and passion attainment predicted higher GPAs in part through increased immersion. The present results help resolve the mixed evidence of grit’s relationship with performance by highlighting the important role that passion plays in predicting performance. By adequately measuring both perseverance and passion, the present research uncovers grit’s true predictive power.

Commuting with a Plan: How Goal-Directed Prospection Can Offset the Strain of Commuting

Sustaining large-scale public goods requires individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions today to benefit future generations1–6. Recent research suggests that second-order normative beliefs are more powerful predictors of behaviour than first-order personal beliefs7,8. We explored the role that second-order normative beliefs—the belief that community members think that saving energy helps the environment—play in curbing energy use. We first analysed a data set of 211 independent, randomized controlled trials conducted in 27 US states by Opower, a company that uses comparative information about energy consumption to reduce household energy usage (pooled N = 16,198,595). Building off the finding that the energy savings varied between 0.81% and 2.55% across states, we matched this energy use data with a survey that we conducted of over 2,000 individuals in those same states on their first-order personal and second-order normative beliefs. We found that second-order normative beliefs predicted energy savings but first-order personal beliefs did not. A subsequent pre-registered experiment provides causal evidence for the role of second-order normative beliefs in predicting energy conservation above first-order personal beliefs. Our results suggest that second-order normative beliefs play a critical role in promoting energy conservation and have important implications for policymakers concerned with curbing the detrimental consequences of climate change.Analyses of data from 211 independent, randomized controlled trials (N = 16,198,595) show that second-order normative beliefs—community members’ belief that saving energy helps the environment—play a critical role in promoting energy conservation.