Education On Altruism
The role of education to society cannot be underestimated. Education as investment for individuals often be discussed in the human capital theory. Human capital theory suggests that investment in human capital through education will lead to raise in economic growth (Almenderez, 2013). Studies has shown that education has fundamental role to economic growth; the enhancement in education can expands knowledge, improve cognitive ability, and accelerate productivity; then give significant impact to economic well-being (Weisbord, 1962; Ozturk, 2001; Barro, 2001; Hanushek and Woessman 2008; Almenderez, 2013).
Cognition is one of component to attitudes, besides, affection and behavior; cognitive, affection, and behavior might also correlated to each other (Fabrigar et al. , 2005; Huang, Beatson, and Lings, 2015). Observing this framework, the interest about relationship between attitude and economic growth has attracted some scholars to do further research. Algan and Cahuc (2007) argued that social attitudes had causal effect on macroeconomic outcome; mostly through productivity and accumulation of physical and capital. Berggren and Elinder (2012) and Beccheti (2007) interpreted that economic growth is affected by tolerance. As its importance, recently, education is not only expected to benefit individuals’ income, but also, to form individuals’ attitudes. Brennan, et al. (2013) shows evidence that higher education level are correlate to positive well-being, social and cultural benefit to individuals, families, and society.
Therefore, in the recent years, there has been growing interest in examining impact of education towards attitudes, especially social related attitudes such as trust, altruistic, and tolerance. The positive impact of education on altruistic behavior, trust, social tolerance, and political tolerance through quantitative analysis has been covered by many scholars (Padgett, 2011; Kan and Lai 2015; Bobo and Licari, 1989; Moore and Ovadia 2006; Taylor, 1998). However, insignificant result of higher education on tolerance has also discovered by Halpern (2003). Wodtke (2012) suggested different result of significance impact of education to racial attitudes between White, Asians, Hispanics, and Black in United States. Drazanova (2017) found that education effect on tolerance vary on regards cross-national analysis of several countries in Europe, US, and Asia. Following mixed finding regarding impact of education on social attitudes, it is intriguing to explore more about this research field. Most previous studies have been conducted in developed country; however, little is known about the study in developing country.
Therefore, this research tries to complement previous study by using data set from developing country which is Indonesia. Previously, Gaduh (2012) and Hadi et al (2017) has examined the relationship of level of education to altruism, tolerance, and discrimination; nevertheless, the methodology that had been done did not involve causal impact analysis. Thus, this paper differs from previous paper in its methodological approach. Roth and Sumarto (2015) indicate there is positive effect of education on interethnic and interreligious tolerance in Indonesia by employing difference in difference strategy; however, the research focused only on two main variables which are opinion of individual if others with different religion and ethnic live in their neighborhood.
Also, they used INPRES as instrumental variable. This paper then differs from the outcome variables, construction of the sample, and its instrumental variable. This paper aims to investigate the causal impact of educational attainment on altruism, discriminative trust, and tolerance attitudes. The research study tries to present whether obtaining longer years of schooling would increase individuals’ probability to become more helpful and more tolerant group. Understanding the result of this research may give government of Indonesia new point of view about education policies. The rest of paper conform to following plan, chapter 2 presents literature review, chapter 3 includes methodology and data, the empirical result and discussion are provided in chapter 4, and chapter 5 concludes the paper by descriptive analysis.
