Effects of economic uncertainty and socioeconomic status on reproductive timing: A life history approach. Kenneth Tan et al. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, Volume 3, 2022, 100040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2022.100040
Highlights
• Adaptive responses to economic uncertainty depend on the harshness of early-life environment, as reflected by childhood socioeconomic status
• Reproductive timing should also be influenced by economic uncertainty and childhood socioeconomic status
• Under economic uncertainty, people who grew up in lower-SES environments reported wanting children sooner
• Under economic uncertainty, people who grew up in higher-SES environments reported wanting children later
• Reproductive timing was determined by considering the desire between reproduction and furthering one's education or career
Abstract: Why do some people have children earlier compared to others who delay reproduction? Drawing from an evolutionary, life history theory perspective, we posited that reproductive timing could be influenced by economic uncertainty and childhood socioeconomic status (SES). For individuals lower in childhood SES, economic uncertainty influenced the desire to reproduce earlier compared to individuals higher in childhood SES. Furthermore, the decision regarding reproductive timing was influenced by tradeoffs between earlier reproduction or furthering one's education or career. Overall, economic uncertainty appears to shift individuals into different life history strategies as a function of childhood SES, suggesting how ecological factors and early life environment can influence fertility-related decisions at the individual level and may contribute to the highly variable fertility patterns observed across countries.
General discussion
We examined whether variability in reproductive timing and attitudes can be influenced by economic uncertainty. Results showed that the association between people's childhood environment and their desired reproductive timing depended on economic uncertainty cues in their current environments: When facing current economic uncertainty, individuals who grew up in resource-scarce (versus resource-abundant) environments reported more positive attitudes toward earlier reproductive timing and desired to have their first child sooner (i.e., faster life history strategy). These findings were robust to two different measures of childhood SES: objective and subjective childhood SES.
Furthermore, we provided some insight as to why individuals differed in their reports of reproductive timing and replicated the key interaction between childhood environment and current economic uncertainty on life history tradeoffs. Individuals who grew up in resource-scarce (versus resource-abundant) environments reported preferring earlier reproduction to investing in education or work experience (i.e., faster life history strategy) when they faced current economic uncertainty. It should be noted that individuals with lower childhood SES still reported scores above the midpoint, indicating that they favored investing in education or work experience, albeit less strongly. Importantly, these tradeoffs regarding reproductive vs. somatic effort desire mediated the effect of economic uncertainty and childhood SES on reproductive attitudes.
A meta-analytic summary
The effect of economic uncertainty on reproductive timing was consistent across differing samples and varied measures of childhood SES. Nonetheless, due to sample size limitations and differing effect sizes, we sought to test the robustness of our effects. We conducted an integrative data analysis (IDA; Curran and Hussong, 2009), a technique that allows for primary or secondary analyses of data from multiple samples, in order to increase power and provide an overall test of hypotheses across datasets. To conduct the IDA, we standardized childhood SES within their respective sample, removing sample-level mean and variance differences, and controlled for study sample. We focused on the outcome variable of desired age of first child as that was the same construct across both studies.
There was no significant main effect of economic uncertainty, b = 0.16, t(3851) = 1.28, p = .20; 95% CI [-0.09, 0.41], no significant main effect of childhood SES, b = 0.02, t(385) = .17, p = .87; 95% CI [-0.24, 0.28], but a significant main effect of study, b = -0.61, t(385) = -2.22, p = .03; 95% CI [-1.15, -0.07]. Most important, consistent with hypotheses, there was a significant childhood SES × economic uncertainty interaction, b = 0.30, t(385) = 2.30, p = .02, R2 = 0.30; 95% CI [0.04, 0.56].
Among participants in the economic uncertainty condition, those with higher (versus lower) childhood SESs desired children marginally significantly further in the future, b = 0.32, t(385) = 1.72, p = .08; 95% CI [-0.04, 0.69]; among participants in the control/economic certainty condition, we did not detect an association between childhood SES and desired reproductive timing, b = -0.8, t(385) = -1.53, p = .13; 95% CI [-0.64, 0.08]. Test of simple slopes at high (+1 SD) and low (-1 SD) levels of childhood SES revealed that individual simple slopes indicating an effect of economic uncertainty was not significant for low-childhood SES individuals, b = -0.12, t(385) = -.69, p = .49; 95% CI [-0.48, 0.23] but was significant for high-childhood SES individuals, b = 0.46, t(385) = 2.57, p = .01; 95% CI [0.11, 0.81]. In summary, the aggregated analysis show evidence in support of our predictions.
By examining economic uncertainty, we build on past work examining the effects of mortality cues and reproductive timing from a life history perspective (Griskevicius et al., 2011). Like mortality cues, economic uncertainty represents unpredictability and harshness in the environment—in this case, stemming from the lack of resources (Ellis et al., 2009). Both economic uncertainty and mortality threat manipulations are extrinsic stressors that signal current environmental threat, and although they have been shown to have similar effects across some outcomes such as impulsivity and risk-taking, this has yet to be examined for outcomes related to reproductive timing (Griskevicius et al., 2013; Griskevicius et al., 2011). Moreover, developed East Asian countries are facing especially low fertility rates, and modernization might make mortality cues less salient compared to economic uncertainty cues. Indeed, some research has shown that economic endeavors are especially prioritized over reproductive effort in developed East Asian countries (Yong et al., 2019). Hence, the current findings provide novel insights beyond past work, regarding the effects of economic uncertainty on whether and why people reared in wealthier (versus poorer) environments have children earlier versus later.
We found inconsistent effects in fertility expectations in our comparison conditions across both studies. Specifically, in Study 1, individuals who were raised in different childhood environments showed no differences in reproductive timing when facing economic certainty, replicating previous research suggesting that benign and safe environments might not elicit SES effects on life history strategies (Griskevicus et al., 2011; 2013). However, in Study 2, individuals raised in different childhood environments showed opposing effects in the control condition compared to the economic uncertainty condition. One possible explanation might lie in how risk preferences might change as a function of childhood environment and economic uncertainty (Nettle, 2009). Prior research shows that individuals raised in wealthier childhood environments express greater appetite for risks when there is no immediate threat (Griskevicius et al., 2011). It might be that, for our participants in the control condition, those raised in wealthier environments felt better able to risk earlier reproduction and cope with subsequent child rearing, whereas those raised in poorer environments preferred slightly less risk and focused on investing in somatic effort, especially so in a developed and urban environment such as Singapore. Future research could examine this idea more thoroughly. Regardless, what is key is that economic uncertainty elicited divergent life history strategies in terms of reproductive timing.
Implications
The current research has implications for various literatures. For instance, the findings help substantiate an evolutionary life-history mismatch perspective on reproductive decisions (Li et al., 2018). According to this perspective, humans have evolved mechanisms that take in environmental cues related to harshness and uncertainty and process them according to decision rules that produce output in the form of attitudes and behaviors regarding reproductive decisions. Although these decision rules, on average, led to adaptive decisions in the ancestral past, they are now processing evolutionarily novel inputs that may not have the same implications for reproductive fitness.
Importantly, because resource uncertainty may have had life-or-death consequences for offspring throughout human evolutionary history, mechanisms may have evolved to adaptively adjust reproductive strategies in response to cues of resource scarcity and uncertainty. As the current work suggests, even though the modern world is relatively safe and abundant, such mechanisms may nonetheless still be processing cues such as economic uncertainty. Combined with other evolutionarily novel features found in modern societies that may be similarly processed by reproductive mechanisms, such as enormously large population densities (Sng et al., 2018) and the insatiability of social status in an increasingly global world (Li et al. 2015; Yong et al., 2019), such cues may lead to a maladaptive slowing down of fertility to the point where local populations drastically shrink. Future research may benefit from investigating the extent to which these and other evolutionarily novel modern conditions (e.g., a lack of exposure to elements of nature that might signify safety and resource abundance in ancestral times; Li et al., 2018) may be contributing to the ultra-low fertility found in all East Asian countries, parts of Southeast Asia and Europe, and an increasing number of other modern societies.
Limitations and future directions
Although we consistently found moderating effects of economic uncertainty cues on the relationship between childhood SES and desired reproduction timing, there were minor limitations regarding our manipulations in Study 1 (i.e., status uncertainty and negative affect) that we tried to address in Study 2. It could also be noted that in spite of our Study 2 manipulation being adapted from prior research (e.g., Griskevicius et al., 2010), the focal manipulation was about a contextual manipulation of uncertainty (unemployment) whereas the control condition was about an individual manipulation of uncertainty (losing one's wallet). Even though we are confident in the validity of our manipulations and results, future research could utilize more robust manipulations of uncertainty and ensuing comparisons to gain a better understanding of the effects of uncertainty on life history strategies.
Furthermore, the range of childhood SES from which we sampled was limited. University students typically are young and often come from middle- or upper-level SES backgrounds. Sampling from a wider range of childhood SES may uncover more powerful effects of childhood environment on reproductive timing. Nevertheless, the fact that we repeatedly found the moderating effect of economic uncertainty on the effects of perceived childhood SES suggests this effect may be quite robust in this population. Similarly, we sampled from a limited range of ages. Even though life history decisions in terms of reproductive timing are likely highly relevant to college-aged people, recruiting a sample that varies more in participant age might reveal potential boundary conditions of our effects. It should also be noted that our participant sample was largely female, but we did not find any gender main effects nor interactions with any of our findings. Importantly, our results regarding gender are consistent with prior life history research that examined the effects of mortality cues on reproductive timing and risk-taking, where mortality cues influenced men and women similarly and there were also no potential sex differences found on the main effect of reproductive timing as well (see Griskevicius et al., 2011; Griskevicius et al., 2011;). Nonetheless, we might not have had enough power to detect gender interactions because of our sample; future research should ensure a more equal representation between the sexes, even though we are relatively confident regarding the results that there are no potential sex differences.
In addition, our samples are from Singapore—a nation that is at or near the lowest nationwide fertility rate in the world and constitutes a cultural departure from typical psychology samples that examine Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) participants (Henrich et al., 2010) . On the other hand, college students in Singapore do fall into the categories of E, I, and R. Future research could collect more culturally diverse samples to extend the generalizability of our results. Finally, given the limitations of our student samples, it remains unclear the extent to which our outcome measures that focus on intentions (i.e., desired age of first child, reproductive timing attitude, reproductive vs. somatic effort desire) generalize to actual reproduction timing and behavior. After all, most young undergraduates have little to no experience with reproductive decisions, and intentions to reproduce might not translate to actual reproduction behavior in the general population. However, meta-analytic data suggest that intentions strongly predict actual behavior, in spite of an intention-behavior gap (Sheeran and Webb, 2016). Furthermore, given that reproduction is costly both biologically and in terms of opportunity for increasing embodied capital, it would be adaptive for one to first have reproductive intentions to aid planning and preparing for the arrival of future offspring. As such, we believe that reproductive timing intentions are frequently a precursor to actual reproductive behavior. Nonetheless, future research should prospectively examine the association between childhood SES, economic uncertainty, and actual reproduction behaviors.
We did not fully examine the proximate psychological processes underlying these divergent effects. Future research is needed to examine other possible mediators, such as sense of control. Recent research points to sense of control as a psychological driver of behaviors associated with different life history strategies (Mittal and Griskevicius, 2014), and so may help explain why environmental uncertainty alters the association between childhood environment and reproductive timing, as well as other related concepts such as risk-taking and valuation of quantity versus quality (Griskevicius et al., 2013; White et al., 2013). Given that conditions of uncertainty are associated with less control, fast strategists may respond by prioritizing immediate reproductive efforts, which includes taking more risks for larger immediate payoffs and having children sooner (Mittal and Griskevicius, 2014). Conversely, slow strategists may respond by prioritizing somatic effort in an effort to regain the sense of control they are used to. Sense of control might also be related to optimism or confidence about abilities to deal with economic uncertainty, and results in the adoption of faster or slower life history strategies (Mittal and Griskevicius, 2014). Future research is needed to ascertain if sense of control or optimism are indeed mediating variables in the relationship between economic uncertainty and reproductive timing. One might also examine mortality thoughts that could arise from economic uncertainty, as resource scarcity could represent cues of unpredictability and harshness in ancestral environments (Griskevicius et al., 2013).
Finally, the link between economic uncertainty and fertility is particularly relevant in current times, given the coronavirus-19 pandemic and its influence on economic uncertainty and instability (see Fernandes, 2020). Future research can fruitfully investigate how variables such as disease prevalence—which has been shown to be linked adaptively to cross-cultural differences in personality traits (Schaller and Murray, 2008)—and economic uncertainty interact and influence reproductive timing mechanisms.
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