The Social Origins of Effort: How Incentives Reduce Socioeconomic Disparities among Children

Cognitive effort (i.e., the mobilization of mental resources for task performance) is essential to equality of opportunity and meritocracy because it epitomizes individual agency. However, sociological theories of social inequality in effort are scarce and partial, and available empirical measures of effort are unreliable and lack validity. We fill this lacuna by (1) elaborating a theoretical account of how socioeconomic status (SES) affects children’s cognitive effort, (2) developing a novel re