Reproducibility package for How Culturally Wise Psychological Interventions Can Help Reduce Poverty

Poverty is characterized by multidimensional economic, social, and psychological forces that, notably, constrain one’s agency over their fate. How can interventions best support the agency of low-income individuals and, in so doing, boost poverty-reduction efforts? We theorize, and find, that agency interventions are effective when they are designed to be “culturally wise,” i.e., attuned to the model of agency predominant in a cultural context. Focusing on low-income women in rural Niger, Study 1 finds that local mental models of economic success are grounded primarily in interdependence, centering relational factors like social harmony, respect, and collective benefits. As evidenced by data from a U.S. sample, this contrasts with a more independent model of agency common in the West, which centers self-oriented personal factors like self-initiative. Study 2 finds empirical support for these mental models in secondary analyses examining relational mechanisms (e.g., social standing) and self-oriented personal mechanisms (e.g., self-efficacy) of women’s economic advancement in a highly effective multifaceted poverty reduction program. Study 3 reports a field experiment with program participants (n = 2,628) to compare, to a control, a Western-derived personal agency intervention and a culturally wise relational agency intervention. Only relational agency caused significant improvements in economic outcomes over 12 months, as well as some personal and relational outcomes. By contrast, personal agency showed limited effects, shifting only personal outcomes. These findings reveal the promise of research at the intersection of social and cultural psychology, behavioral science, and development economics to help address global poverty.