Funded Research
Explaining the Education Effect and the Demography of Risk: Comparing Unschooled and Schooled on Everyday Reasoning and Decision-Making Skills about Health Behavior
Source: NSF
Active: 10/01/2008 - 09/30/2010
Investigator(s):
David Baker
Paul Eslinger
This multidisciplinary project combines cognitive science and the psychology of decision-making with cross-cultural sociology of education to test how formal schooling influences reasoning and decision-making skills for navigating everyday health risk. Basic education is now rapidly expanding around the world. At the same time the demographic literature is brimming with results showing the robust positive effect of formal schooling on health, so much so that education is often assumed to be a major cause behind the demographic transition of modern society, which consists of reduced mortality and fertility, and longer life spans. While most demographers and health researchers acknowledge the persistent and significant association between formal schooling and positive health outcomes, why education has this influence is not understood and a multidisciplinary investigation of how this effect occurs is the chief intellectual merit of the proposed study. Following prior results, it is hypothesized here that schooling, through the teaching of subjects like mathematics, enhances reasoning and thus improves risk assessment and decision-making skills that schooled individuals bring to everyday health risk.
