There's one fact we must acknowledge:

There's a correlation between parental education and their children's education.

Children of parents who graduated from university are more likely to attend university, while those of parents who didn't are less likely.

This has been repeatedly confirmed by statistics worldwide.

Faced with this fact, people tend to lean towards one of two conclusions:

Is it genetics, or is it environment?

But what I want to discuss today is neither of those.

In one experiment, the same people were given the same problem to solve.

The only thing that changed was how the purpose of the test was explained.

That alone resulted in a clear difference in performance.

Moreover, this difference only appeared in people who grew up in a specific family.

The same problem. The same time limit. The same classroom.

The only difference was the few seconds of explanation before the problem was distributed.

Why does this happen?

Using data from behavioral genetics and social psychology,
we will dissect the mechanism by which educational attainment appears to be inherited.

~Chapters~

00:00 Parental Education and Child's Education
01:20 The Influence of Genetics Was Not Constant
03:45 The Amount of Words Used and Teacher Expectations
06:03 An Experiment: How a Single Explanation Changed Grades
07:32 Anxiety Drains Mental Capacity
09:11 The Defense of "It Doesn't Concern Me"
10:28 Options Don't Appear in One's Vision
12:39 No One Is Malicious
13:46 Perception Can Be Changed
16:24 It Wasn't Ability That Was Inherited

~References~

Tarkheimer et al. (2003) "In poor families, the contribution of genetics to the variation in intelligence was almost zero, and shared environment accounted for about 60%. In wealthy families, the results were almost the exact opposite." Psychological Science

Croisé & Claire (1998): "In conditions where tests were explained as 'measurements of intellectual ability,' students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds performed worse. However, in conditions where tests were explained as 'not measures of ability,' this difference did not appear."

Study on stereotype threat and low-income students: "Students exposed to threats experienced increased test anxiety and lower grades, but their effort remained unchanged. On the other hand, their self-identification to the academic domain decreased." Social Psychology of Education

Quiet Rationality

Why does the whole system break down when individuals behave correctly?

This dissects the underlying structures of familiar phenomena using data from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics.

#Education #Genetics #EducationalInequality #SocialPsychology #BehavioralGenetics #StereotypeThreat #Psychology #Parenting #Education #QuietRationality