Germans who lived in the former East Germany have substantially more self-control than West Germans, and a study in The Economic Journal points to government surveillance as a possible reason.
“Surveillance and Self-Control”, by Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Sarah C. Dahmann, Daniel A. Kamhöfer and Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch, was published online on December 18, 2023.
The Berlin Wall as an experiment
The authors used population-representative data and treated Germany’s division as quasi-experimental variation. People on either side of the border lived under very different political institutions for decades.
In an earlier working-paper version (IZA Discussion Paper No. 12488, July 2019), the team describes adding the 13-item Tangney Self-Control Scale to the 2017 Innovation Sample of the German Socio-Economic Panel. That representative household survey included more than 5,500 people by 2014.
In that version, people who had lived in the German Democratic Republic before the fall of the Wall scored 0.28 standard deviations higher in self-control than former West Germans once other factors were controlled.
The working paper linked the gap to the need for GDR residents to be cautious in what they said and did, to protect their educational and career chances, their freedom, and their families and friends. The published paper provides evidence for government surveillance as a possible underlying mechanism.
The size of the difference matters. Based on their estimates, the working paper calculated that a gap of 0.28 standard deviations would be expected to go with 0.06 additional years of education and a 1.4 percentage point lower obesity risk.
Age matters, gender and family background do not
Self-control increased linearly with age.
In contrast to earlier findings for children, there was no gender gap in adult self-control. The working paper notes that the distributions for men and women were virtually identical. Family background did not predict self-control either.
The earlier version also found that self-control was negatively related to fluid intelligence, and that an education reform which added years of schooling did not raise it, suggesting that education is a consequence rather than a cause of self-control.
The authors conclude that institutional factors can shape people’s self-control, a trait usually studied through individual, family or biological lenses.
Study Details:
- Title: Surveillance and Self-Control
- Authors: Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Sarah C. Dahmann, Daniel A. Kamhöfer, Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch
- Journal: The Economic Journal
- Publication Date: December 18, 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/ej/uead111