Why Financial Incentives Isn’t the Answer to Boost Fertility
In contemporary and prosperous societies, the perplexing decline in fertility rates has become a subject of extensive exploration across diverse fields. Despite heightened multidisciplinary scrutiny, the profound causes and psychological mechanisms underpinning modern low fertility remain largely elusive.
Modern environments, laden with stressors like a lack of social support, intense competition, and media saturation, induce chronic psychological stress leading to immune dysfunction and chronic diseases. Building on this, an evolutionary life history mismatch model proposes that modern cues of competition hijack psychological mechanisms evolved to assess one's social standing and reproductive strategies, causing people to maladaptively delay reproduction.
Humans compete with one another for resources and mates to achieve reproductive success, and the attainment of social status is vital to this goal. Having sufficient status meant having access to resources that is instrumental to survival and reproductive goals.
Problematically, modern developed societies, like Singapore, contain ubiquitous cues that lead us to believe we have insufficient status to pursue mating (or to accept someone else as an adequate mate)—even when we objectively have sufficient resources to pursue mating and have children. Today's urban landscapes, with their dense populations and global influx of talent, signal intense competition and amplify the sense that resources are not readily available. Moreover, with our bias towards evaluating sufficiency in relative rather than absolute terms, these modern cues prompt individuals to think that there are a lot of people to out-compete and perpetually chase a moving target of “sufficient” social status. In this way, our adapted mechanisms are mismatched to modern circumstances and are being fooled into delaying reproduction. Modern contexts interfere with the assessment of social status that leads to the constant belief that we have insufficient status to pursue mating and that more status should be sought.
Why would seeking more status interfere with reproduction? The underlying conundrum stems from the fact that people have limited time and energy, which means that they face important trade-offs in terms of time and energy allocation. Pursuing career success demands significant investment, as does the endeavour of raising a family - a pursuit in one goal is in direct conflict to the other. In contexts where there is a perceived insufficiency of resources, people are especially motivated to prioritize attaining social status and delaying starting a family.
Across two experimental studies*, people’s desire for wanting more status was manipulated; these studies revealed that thirst for higher status can lead to a preference for marrying and having children at a later age.
These results offer an explanation as to why subfertility is such a rising problem in the modern world by drawing attention to an important and underexplored factor – the perception of status competition. Rather than relying solely on financial incentives, policymakers might find value in regulating people’s perception of status competition in our interconnected world as a novel approach to increasing reproduction rates.
* This research project was funded by MOE Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 1 grant and led by Professor Norman Li (Singapore Management University).
Further readings:
Lim, A. J., Li, N. P., Manesi, Z., Neuberg, S. L., van Vugt, M., Meltzer, A. L., & Tan, K. (2023). Desire for Social Status Affects Marital and Reproductive Attitudes: A Life History Mismatch Perspective. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 100125.
Lim, A. (2023, September 13). Beyond money: Why financial incentives alone aren't encouraging more births. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/beyond-money-why-financial-incentives-alone-aren-t-encouraging-more-births
