4 research outputs found
Behavioral Economics and Microfinance: A Study of Risk Preferences in Rural South Africa
No full textBy replicating the seminal work of Kahneman and Tversky in rural South Africa, the present study shows that female borrowers from the Small Enterprise Foundation microfinance bank do not exhibit loss aversion and have very different risk preferences than Western subjects. PSYC 2990, Honors Program in Psychological Sciences, Professor Craig Smith.When deciding between safe and risky prospects, human decision-makers exhibit a number of framing effects. One of the most prominent of these effects, the reflection effect, is the tendency for decision makers to evaluate gambles relative to a reference point, and to act risk-seeking when prospects are framed as losses but risk-averse when identical prospects are framed as gains. This tendency is one of the primary predictions of Prospect Theory, the modified Expected Utility Theory that was proposed by Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The present study seeks to closely replicate the work of the Nobel laureates in the cross-cultural setting of rural South Africa with subjects who are extremely poor. Using a similar choice problem to that of Kahneman and Tversky’s Asian Disease Study, we show that subjects exhibit an alternate reversal of risk preferences depending on whether outcomes are presented as Gains or Losses. These results seem to suggest that poor South African women exhibit similar framing effects but that their risk preferences are the complete opposite of the Western Kahneman and Tversky subjects. This study therefore finds a skewed preference for risk and loss in its cross-cultural subjects and suggests that specific decision-making phenomena are not necessarily universal. The implications of this study are wide reaching, as they move closer to a theory of how poverty influences decision-making.Thesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Honors Program in Psychological SciencesVanderbilt UniversityPsychological Science
How U.S. Conservatives perceive and respond to international nutrition issues, and how to shape messaging for successful advocacy
No full textSince 1990, tremendous strides have been made in global health and development toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. With a united front of forces, including governments, coalitions, private sector, foundations, philanthropic organizations, and the faith community, millions of lives have been saved from extreme poverty and disease. Yet, some issues enjoy more robust funding and notoriety than others. For instance, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria enjoy the majority of the U.S. foreign assistance funding in global health. Nutrition, notably, has remained stagnant for decades. Through this research, we sought to test the appetite for increased funding for international nutrition and food security issues among Political, Religious, Social Conservatives (PRSCs), and the General Population (GP) to gauge perception and response to the issue and its correlates. Our objective with these national surveys was to understand the best choice of language to promote awareness, education, and prompt advocacy for global nutrition and food security issues. With this research, we found that conservatives were motivated by national security issues first and at a macro-level, not their faith, finances or moral foundation. We recommend that education be enhanced among conservatives regarding U.S. foreign assistance, nutrition funding and implementation, and nutrition-related terminology, including stunting, wasting, and anemia. Moreover, we recommend communicating strong narratives about mothers, children, and infants, particularly a child’s first 1,000 days, from conception to two years, which has proved to elicit the most positive response among all messaging
Global Dimensions of Gifted Education: Cross-National Dichotomies between Perceptions, Practices, and Policies
No full textWe examine recent research across countries and cultures in regard to the issues related to the formation of gifted and talented education perspectives, policies, and practices.┬á Many modern cultures and subcultures have developed formal and informal definitions of what it means to be gifted and talented, and when we compare the perceptions, policies, and practices across nations, we discover very different constructs of intelligence and ability.┬á These understandings of giftedness and gifted and talented education can be grouped into four binary dimensions, scholarly versus co-curricular capabilities, aptitude versus achievement, nature versus nurture, and individualistic versus collective, that have significant implications for policy and practice.┬á These constructs can serve as a foundation for countries that are looking to formalize or expand their gifted and talented education models or can be used to challenge the norms of established systems.┬á We put forward recommendations to address some of the challenges in advancing gifted education cross-nationally, an area that is often assumed to introduce risks of enlarging social inequity.┬á We also provide a cross-national matrix that captures known elements of gifted education policies and programs from over 20 subnational jurisdictions, countries, and world regions.┬
From Belfast to Basra: Britain and the 'tri-partite counter-insurgency model'
No full textCounter-insurgency assumed a status during the twentieth century as one of the British military‟s fortes. A wealth of asymmetric warfare experience was accumulated after World War Two, as the small wars of decolonisation offered the army of a fading imperial power the opportunity to regularly deploy against an irregular enemy. Yet this quantity of experience has been misguidedly conflated with quality. This thesis holds that the British, far from being the counter-insurgent exemplars that history has benevolently cast them, have in fact consistently proven to be slow learners and slow strategic burners in the realm of counter-insurgency warfare.
The case study-based nature of this thesis, utilising the chronologically and geographically dispersed examples of Malaya (1948-60), Kenya (1952-60), South Yemen (1962-67), the first decade of the Northern Irish „Troubles‟ (1969-79), culminates with an analysis of the recent British counter-insurgency campaign in southern Iraq (2003-09).
This thesis will blend historical narrative with critical analysis in order to establish a new paradigm through which to interpret and analyse British inertia in counter-insurgency and help unpack the mythology of inherent British competence in the realm of irregular warfare. Three major dimensions emerge. These elements constitute a „Tri-Partite Counter-Insurgency Model‟, and were carefully selected as comprising the major causal and impacting factors contributing to success or failure in counter-insurgency, and were settled upon after an exhaustive review of primary and secondary literature relating to counter-insurgency, both historical and doctrinal. The Tri-Partite Model is constructed by three interactive and interdependent factors: the counter-insurgent, the insurgent, and the international political context
