Effects of early education intervention on behavior persist for 4 decades

Adults who had received early life, intensive childhood educational intervention display high levels of fairness in social interactions more than 40 years later, even when being fair comes at a high personal cost, according to a new study.

In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers describe how they asked 78 participants from the Abecedarian Project, one of the longest running randomized controlled studies of the effects of early childhood education in low-income families, to participate in economic games measuring social norm enforcement and future planning during social decision-making. An additional 252 participants who did not receive any childhood intervention were recruited to serve as a control group. The Abecedarian researchers investigated whether an intensive early childhood educational intervention could produce significant benefits in language and learning in disadvantaged children.

The new research suggests that participants who received intensive educational interventions in early childhood show positive effects on social decision-making more than four decades later. Participants were invited to take part in an economic game to split $20. One player decides how to split the money. The research participants could either accept the amount proposed, or reject it, in which case no one receives any money. Receiving unequal offers sets up a context in which they have to make trade-offs between self-interest and the enforcement of social norms of equality.

Abecedarian players who received intensive, five-year educational intervention including cognitive and social stimulation when they were young children in the 1970s strongly rejected unequal division of money across players, even if it meant they would miss out on hefty financial gains themselves.

"When someone rejects an offer, they are sending a very strong signal to the other player about the decision regarding how the money should be divided," said co-first author of the study. "People who received educational training through the Abecedarian Project were inclined to accept generally equal offers, but would reject disadvantageous and advantageous offers, in effect punishing transgressions that they judged to be outside of the social norm of equality."

In addition, using computational modeling, the researchers discovered differences in social decision-making strategies. For example, participants who received educational interventions planned further into the future in another economic game.

"The participants who received early educational interventions were very sensitive to inequality, whether it was to their advantage or disadvantage. Our results also suggest that they placed more value in the long-term benefits of promoting social norms as opposed to short-term benefits from personal gains," said first author of the research. "Our research shows investment in the early childhood education, especially in the education of highly vulnerable children from low-income families, can produce long-term effects in decision-making even decades after the educational experience."

https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2018/11/naturecomm-vtcri-112018.html