Eight-minute self-regulation intervention raises educational attainment at scale in individualist but not collectivist cultures

Abstract

Academic credentials open up a wealth of opportunities. However, many people drop out of educational programs, such as community college and online courses. Prior research found that a brief self-regulation strategy can improve self-discipline and academic outcomes. Could this strategy support learners at large scale? Mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) involves writing about positive outcomes associated with a goal, the obstacles to achieving it, and concrete if-then plans to overcome them. The strategy was developed in Western countries (United States, Germany) and appeals to individualist tendencies, which may reduce its efficacy in collectivist cultures such as India or China. We tested this hypothesis in two randomized controlled experiments in online courses (n = 17,963). Learners in individualist cultures were 32% (first experiment) and 15% (second experiment) more likely to complete the course following the MCII intervention than a control activity. In contrast, learners in collectivist cultures were unaffected by MCII. Natural language processing of written responses revealed that MCII was effective when a learner's primary obstacle was predictable and surmountable, such as everyday work or family obligations but not a practical constraint (e.g., Internet access) or a lack of time. By revealing heterogeneity in MCII's effectiveness, this research advances theory on self-regulation and illuminates how even highly efficacious interventions may be culturally bounded in their effects.

Keywords: culture; education; field experiment; goal pursuit; motivation.

Fig. 1.

MCII raises course completion only among learners in individualist countries. Course completion outcomes of two randomized field experiments evaluating the effect of mental contrasting (MC), implementation intentions (II), and mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) relative to a control activity in three cultural contexts defined by the Hofstede collectivism–individualism index: collectivist countries [0, 33], balanced countries [34, 66], and individualist countries [67, 100]. Error bars represent ±1 SE.

Fig. 2.

MCII’s effect is conditional on the type of learners’ stated obstacle. Course completion outcomes in the first experiment examined by obstacle type and cultural context (n = 9,619). Three obstacle types were identified using natural language processing (latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling) of learners’ stated obstacles. Error bars represent ±1 SE.

Fig. S1.

Course persistence in terms of the percentage of lectures watched in two randomized experiments. The figure shows the distribution density of course persistence for each experimental condition (line color) in three cultural contexts (horizontal facets). Cultural context is defined at a national level based on the Hofstede collectivism–individualism index: collectivist countries [0, 33], balanced countries [34, 66], and individualist countries [67, 100]. In the first experiment, the density lines are visually indistinguishable due to high zero-inflation and overdispersion.