社会情感技能是否有效以及它们能否通过培训发展？

11384 Do Socio-Emotional Skills Pay Offand Can They Be Developed Through Training? A Meta-Analysis Diego Angel-UrdinolaMaurice KuglerNarae LeeAngelo SantoOlzhas Zhorayev Education and Skills Global DepartmentMay 2026 A verified reproducibility package for this paper isavailable athttp://reproducibility.worldbank.org,clickherefor direct access. Policy Research Working Paper11384 Abstract This paper synthesizes the growing evidence on the labormarket returns to socio-emotional skills and assesses theeffectiveness of training programs designed to develop theseskills. While existing studies document elevated re-turnsto socio-emotional skills in the labor market, there is littleconsensus on which specific aspects of the skills drivethese gains. Using one of the established psychologicalmeasures, the Big Five personality traits (the Big Five), thepaper defines relevant keywords for socio-emotional skills,conducts web scraping of the literature, and constructs adatabase of coefficients on returns and training impacts.DerSimonian and Laird random-effects estimates suggestthat a one standard deviation increase in each of the BigFive traits is associated with a 1.4 to 3.1 percent increase in real wages, with substantial heterogeneity across individ-ual traits, demographic groups, and country income levels.Among the Big Five, lower agreeableness, often associatedwith assertiveness and being able to challenge consensus,exhibits the highest wage returns (3.1 percent). Trainingprograms improve the Big Five traits by an average of 0.46standard deviation, with larger effects for attitude-relatedtraits such as openness (0.67 standard deviation) and con-scientiousness (0.40 standard deviation). Although earlychildhood constitutes a critical period for cognitive skill for-mation, the evidence presented in this paper indicates thatsocio-emotional competencies remain markedly malleablein later developmental stages. Well-designed post-secondaryinterventions can generate substantial gains. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Do Socio-Emotional Skills Pay Off and Can They Be DevelopedThrough Training? A Meta-Analysis∗† Diego Angel-Urdinola†Maurice Kugler‡Narae Lee†Angelo Santos†‡Olzhas Zhorayev†‡World Bank Group†George Mason University‡ JEL Codes: I26, J24, J31Keywords:Socio-Emotional Skills, Labor Market Returns, Skills Training, Big Five PersonalityTraits, Meta-Analysis 1Introduction The value of skills in the labor market has shifted dramatically over the past century. In theUnited States, for instance, the wage gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers has continuedto widen (Katz and Murphy,1992). Skill-Biased Technical Change drove this trend in the late 1990sand early 2000s. The earnings of the top percentile and bottom percentile have diverged due to anincreasing skill technology bias that cannot be easily automated or off-shored (Autor et al.,2003;Acemoglu and Autor,2011). However, with further technological advancements, particularly withthe emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), more recent studies suggest that returns to cognitiveskills in the labor market are beginning to decline (Castex and Kogan Dechter,2014;Deming,2017;Ashworth et al.,2021;Hellerstein et al.,2024). This shift places specialized tasks, such as legalanalysis and basic medical prescriptions, at risk (Castex and Kogan Dechter,2014;Brynjolfsson andMcAfee,2014;Beaudry et al.,2016;Edin et al.,2022). Initially observed in advanced economies,this change has also been noted in the labor markets of other countries, albeit to varying degrees,influenced by contextual, institutional, and educational factors (Deming and Silliman,2024). The diminishing returns to cognitive skills have been accompanied by rising relative returns toworkers’ socio-emotional skills. For example,Deming(2017) shows that a young worker switchingto a job requiring 10% higher social skill intensity experienced a 2.1 percentage point wage increase(Deming,2017). Meanwhile, the wage gain from switching to a more math-intensive job declinedby 0.9 percentage points in 1997 compared to 1979. More recent evidence suggests that returns tosocio-emotional skills and traits rapidly grew from the late 1990s to the early 2000s and continuedgrowing thereafter (Edin et al.,2022). Articles commonly stress that workers with strong socio-emotional