MIRERC 034/2025: Socialization, Framing, and Motivation:

Theory and experimental evidence from multilingual Kenyans

Abstract

Executive Summary
There is enormous cultural variation in how American workers are socialized to think
about their work and home lives. Communities of color are more community-oriented
(Nobles 1991); political conservatives think more holistically (Talhelm et al. 2015);
workers in the Mountain West and Great Plains are especially individualistic (Vandello
and Cohen 1999). In higher social class contexts, social networks tend to be large,
far-reaching, diverse and loosely connected (Carey and Markus 2017). In addition to this
cross-sectional variation, each successive generation is socialized to prioritize work,
family, and the self differently. How will this evolution impact the future of labor markets?

The aim of this project is to clarify the basic psychological mechanisms underlying
cultural variation in work attitudes. That is, how much can socialization impact labor
supply beyond typical economic forces such as wealth and outside opportunities? To
isolate the impact of socialization, I propose a lab-in-the-field experiment among
multilingual Kenyans to identify whether wage elasticity responds to cultural framing. I
hypothesize that participants will become more responsive to piece-rate pay when
randomized to access mental schema that are more influenced by markets and
transactions.