Which preferences associate with school performance?—Lessons from an exploratory study with university students

RESEARCH ARTICLE Which preferences associate with school performance?—Lessons from an exploratory study with university students Daniel Horn1,2☯, Hubert Janos Kiss1,2☯* 1 Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, 2 Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Horn D, Kiss HJ (2018) Which preferences associate with school performance?— Lessons from an exploratory study with university students. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0190163. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190163 Editor: Pablo Brañas-Garza, Middlesex University, UNITED KINGDOM Received: July 24, 2017 Accepted: December 8, 2017 Published: February 16, 2018 Copyright: © 2018 Horn, Kiss. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Relevant data are found within the paper, its Supporting Information files, and at easy.dans.knaw.nl/ui under the DOI https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xy2-r4wc/ or dx.doi. org/10.17504/protocols.io.k84czyw. Funding: The work was supported by the Janos Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) to DH and HJK, the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) under project 109354 to HJK, the National Research, Development & Innovation (NKFIH) under project K 119683 to HJK, and Horizon 2020 Twinning ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * Abstract Success in life is determined to a large extent by school performance so it is important to understand the effect of the factors that influence it. In this exploratory study, in addition to cognitive abilities, we attempt to link measures of preferences with outcomes of school performance. We measured in an incentivized way risk, time, social and competitive preferences and cognitive abilities of university students to look for associations between these measures and two important academic outcome measures: exam results and GPA. We find consistently that cognitive abilities (proxied by the Cognitive Reflection Test) are very well correlated with school performance. Regarding non-cognitive skills, we report suggestive evidence for many of our measured preferences. We used two alternative measures of time preference: patience and present bias. Present bias explains exam grades better, while patience explains GPA relatively better. Both measures of time preferences have a non-linear relation to school performance. Competitiveness matters, as students, who opt for a more competitive payment scheme in our experimental task have a higher average GPA. We observe also that risk-averse students perform a little better than more risk-tolerant students. That makes sense in case of multiple choice exams, because more risk-tolerant students may want to try to pass the exam less prepared, as the possibility of passing an exam just by chance is not zero. Finally, we have also detected that cooperative preferences—the amount of money offered in a public good game—associates strongly with GPA in a non-linear way. Students who offered around half of their possible amounts had significantly higher GPAs than those, who offered none or all their money. Introduction There is growing literature that indicates that individual preferences studied by economists affect and predict a wide range of choices made at the individual level. For example, risky choices like smoking, drinking, not having insurance, holding stocks rather than Treasury bills PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190163 February 16, 2018 1 / 32 Which preferences associate with school performance? grant EdEN (grant no. 691676) to DH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. or choosing an occupation with a high earning risks are positively and significantly correlated with risk attitudes (see for instance [1,2,3]. Similarly, time discounting predicts behaviour in many walks of life like health (e.g., BMI—see for instance [4] or creditworthiness—see [5]; savings—see [6]; or credit card balance—see [7]), labour supply and lifetime income [8,9,10]. However, note that the relationships are not always unambiguous, for example for time discounting and health [11,12]. Moreover, in many cases not all measures related to a preference have a predictive power, only some of them [13,14]. In this exploratory study, we focus on educational performance. Using experimental tasks in a university classroom, we attempt to see which preferences may affect school performance. Understanding the factors that shape school performance is of utmost importance as school performance determines to a large extent the success in life as captured, for instance, by the wage premium [15] or the positive relation between schooling and other socioeconomic outcomes (e.g., health—see for instance [16], or voting—see [17]). We consider both cognitive and non-cognitive skills (preferences) and try to measure some of them in the classroom. Note that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are not orthogonal abilities as for instance cognition affects many aspects of human behaviour [18,19]. There is a growing literature that shows that both cognitive ability and non-cognitive skills help to predict outcomes in life besides school performance. Examples include workplace performance, marital status, and risky behaviours [18,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. Then we relate the measures obtained to two outcomes of observable school performance of bachelor students: the exam result of a subject (Economics) and the grade point average (henceforth, GPA) of the semester when the exam was taken. More precisely, we study four interrelated preferences that have received considerable academic attention in the last decades: risk, time, social and competitive preferences. These areas are interrelated as any temporal choice involves risk as the future is inherently uncertain [28]. Therefore, measures of these preferences may be correlated, as we show later. Why is it important to consider the association between these preferences and school performance? We know that academic success depends positively and to a large extent on intellectual ability. Borghans et al. [18] report that IQ predicts outcomes in several fields of life (e.g., job performance and longevity) and is the best predictor for two academic outcomes (college grades and years of education) when compared to the Big Five personality factors. While the importance of cognitive abilities to explain academic success is a general finding, many studies also point out that the (...truncated)