Singapore, 26 March 2018 (Tuesday) – Although economic development is broadly associated with low fertility, countries with a predominantly East Asian cultural population exhibit the lowest fertility rates in the developed world. But why is this so?

A study led by Singapore Management University (SMU) Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr Jose Yong and his co-authors: Dr Norman Li, School of Social Sciences, SMU; Dr Peter Jonason, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Australia; and Dr Tan Yiwen, Arts and Social Sciences, University of Wollongong, Australia, examined social status affordance (SSA) as a novel factor underlying cultural variations in the motivation to marry and have children.

Entitled ‘East Asian Low Marriage and birthrates: the role of life history strategy, culture, and social status affordance’, the research paper was recently published in Personality and Individual Differences.

According to the authors, SSA refers to one’s sense of the ease of “acquiring” social status from the environment. Social status is crucial because it allows people to achieve important goals in life. Indeed, people with higher status are more influential than lower status individuals and are more capable of getting what they want. When the SSA of an environment – a city, a society, a state – is low, resident individuals may perceive social status as scarce and hard to attain. As such, they may feel less capable of achieving important life goals, including marriage and starting a family.

The authors noted that East Asian cultures may have low SSA because of their strong obsession over social status relative to other cultures. The cultural pressure to perform well in school and get high-flying, well-paid jobs can intensify competition for prestigious jobs. As more people flock to these prestigious jobs, they become harder to attain and succeed in. As a result, the social status that can be gained through jobs becomes diminished, resulting in reduced SSA.

Dr Yong said, “This research was inspired by a conversation I had with a young man from a Western country. He had a job that would have been typically regarded as low status and low paying in Singapore, but yet he had no qualms about settling down young and was married with children. This led me to ponder whether people’s considerations for marrying and having children depend on how sufficient they felt their jobs were in enabling them to start and support a family.”

He added, “In this regard, people may differ in their thresholds for sufficiency, and Singaporeans possibly require a higher level of education and job success compared to people from other countries before they feel comfortable enough to settle down. Thus, Singaporeans may be focusing on career and social status first and putting off family goals. In some cases, they may even feel negatively about marriage and family.”

To observe whether SSA was indeed responsible for people’s feelings towards marriage and childbearing, the authors presented 124 Singaporean and 119 Australian undergraduate students from four different universities with a list of jobs and asked them to rate how prestigious and well-paid those jobs are—this served as the measure of SSA—and then compared their desire for marriage and children according to differences in those job perceptions.

Please refer to the media release enclosed for the key findings as well as implications and recommendations for Singapore Society. Dr Jose Yong's CV is also enclosed.