Economics of Pride and Guilt

Pride and guilt are an integral part of human lives. Often, they serve as motivation to work, for example, by pushing us to put in a few hours of labor instead of free-riding on the work done by the peers in a group project. Sometimes, these emotions do the opposite. For example, our pride might keep us from making the call or sending the message that can bridge a friendship on the verge of collapse. Clearly, the world would be a better place if we all could keep our pride and guilt aside, and let the logic of utility drive us to happier outcomes. Alas, that’s not the case.

Since economics is all about efficient allocation, emotions like pride and guilt distort economic outcomes. These emotions are pervasive in the economic sphere, and can take myriad forms. For example, think of the economic consequences of a nationalist pride. When nationalism becomes a rallying cry, free trade plummets, exchange rate appreciation is celebrated, and severing ties with the global economic order is encouraged. Each of these harm the poorest amongst us by lowering job opportunities, reducing market access and making it impossible to ascend the social ladder.

Guilt works in a slightly different way. It might induce undesirable social outcomes. For example, the parental guilt might keep productive, young men from leaving their rural household and working in the cities. This would lower their earnings, which has ripple effects for their own well-being, and that of their children. Similarly, guilt might drive you to give loans and throw money at an uncle who is clearly going to throw it down some drain of foolish ideas. He has no knack for investing or running a business, but your guilt holds you back from cutting off a financial pipeline.

Recent advances in economic and psychology has led to a burgeoning literature on how guilt and pride affects our decision-making. The focus of this article is to explore two such instances. In each case, I discuss the consequences of pride and guilt for decision-making, followed by how a policymaker intervenes to set our decisions right. I hope it provides a new perspective on how policymaking is becoming a more human-centric field each passing day.

Birthing a Baby Boy

It is a common observation that in India, parenting a boy child is a thing of pride. When a boy is born, the child is obviously given better treatment over the girl. Moreover, even the mother of the boy receives more attention than other daughters-in-law within the same household. A competitive race thus exists, where newly-wed couples try their luck in giving the family their first male heir.

In economics literature, the technical term for such pride is “son-preference”. Several researchers have looked at the economic consequences of this phenomenon. One direct consequence of this preference is that girls are often raised in larger families than boys. If a parent’s first child is a girl, they would continue extending their family until they can give birth to a boy. This is also visible in our social circles – girls are less likely to be single-child, and they are also more likely to be the elder siblings in their household.

If the number of children in a household are more, fewer resources are left for each child. Hence, the girls, brought up in systematically larger households, naturally receive lower benefits than boys. This happens even if there is no discrimination between the boys and girls within the same household.

Another interesting consequence of son preference is that girls are generally breast-fed for fewer months than boys. Breast-feeding is a natural contraceptive. If the mother wants to try having a child again in hopes of birthing a boy, she would resist breast-feeding the girl for too long. In poorer and rural settings, this is especially disadvantageous. In such settings, the children are exposed to many germs, and breast-feeding often acts as the only source of food without bacterial contamination. Shifting away from this increases exposure to germs and has detrimental health consequences for the child.

Policymakers in India are baffled by such son preference. Contrary to popular perception, son preference in India has actually grown over the years, as is visible in falling sex ratios. Often, the policymakers exploit the idea of pride in dealing with this issue, as is evident in the slogan “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao”(BBBP). The social campaigns around girl-child focus on ideas of pride like “ghar ki Lakshmi”, depicting women as powerful and successful beings who are at par with men in fields like science and technology. This might stand in contrast to a mother’s lived experience, but she is given the narrative of a hopeful world – the one in which her daughter can be a source of “pride” for her and the family. Hence, the emotions become a tool in policymaker’s larger arsenal, thereby nudging the society towards a more favourable outcome.

A more detailed discussion of son-preference can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgmKqngZY_s

Toilet in, Toilet out

In the previous example, the policymaker leverages the ideas of pride to drive social change. How can we do the same with guilt? A very common example of guilt-driven social change is mission to end open defecation in India through Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan.

The framing of Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan is very different from the previously discussed BBBP. Its ads are often centered around shame – the shame of a husband unable to afford building a toilet for his new wife, the shame of a person who was caught throwing a plastic bag on the road or into the river, among others. The idea is simple – exploiting the inherent desire in humans to conform to societal norms is the key to change behavior.

The problem however, is more complex. In many villages, especially in North India, the “societal norm” is actually that of open defecation. There is a sense of community in defecating in the open  - a practice enshrined in the depictions of groups of men and women traveling together to the fields for their early morning ritual. How do you change individual behaviour when it is actually sanctioned by society? Many believe that the origins of open defecation are caste-centric, as Brahmin households were reluctant to defecate in the same house in which their kitchens and temples were located.

The Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan places its bets on norm entrepreneurs. The inherent belief of this movement is that by building toilets, they can atleast encourage some people to stop defecating in the open. It is likelier that these people would be women, for whom open defecation is not as safe as the men. When a few people start using toilets and seeing open defecation for the social ill that it is, there would be a gradual transformation of norms within the village and society. It will become more acceptable to defecate indoors, and over time, people would shift their morning ablutions away from the fields.

Such transformation is already at work in the southern states, where poorer women who don’t have toilets in their home often report feeling guilty about having to rely on open spaces for defecation. When the government builds public and private toilets, they reduce the guilt and shame faced by these women, while improving the welfare of the village. Guilt-ing people into doing the right thing might sound obnoxious, but is an effective tool to drive meaningful alteration in social norms.

As policymakers decide to tackle increasingly complex and deep-rooted issues, the exploitation of pride and guilt gains momentum as an area of research, experimentation and implementation. If this arouses your curiosity, feel free to drop me a text to discuss other interesting sources that discuss these issues in detail.

-Vastav Ratra