The Invisible Behavioural Scientists

Abstract

This essay examines the behavioural complexity of Indonesian motherhood under socioeconomic constraint. Drawing from community field work and personal parenting experience, it reveals how invisible cognitive labour, identity-based motivations, and scarcity-related cognitive load shape maternal behaviour. Recognising this labour is essential for designing equitable, context-sensitive behavioural interventions that respect rather than override everyday expertise.

The Cultural Frame

Motherhood in Indonesia carries weight in language itself: tiang keluarga (pillar of the family), ibu yang baik (a good mother), harusnya kamu bersyukur (you should be grateful). These phrases shape expectations, but they also obscure a behavioural reality, mothers perform a disproportionate share of cognitive and emotional labour, particularly in low-income households where structural support is thinnest. Through years of community work across Indonesia, I've observed mothers functioning as the primary behavioural "buffer" against inequality. They anticipate risks, prevent crises, and coordinate scarce resources. In behavioural science terms: prospective mental simulation, cognitive load management, and risk minimisation. Yet these sophisticated skills remain unnamed and undervalued precisely because they're embedded in the ordinary.

The Scarcity Multiplier

Poverty taxes cognitive bandwidth, this is well-established. It reduces attention, working memory, and decision quality. Yet mothers in low-income settings continue engaging in high-frequency, high-stakes decision-making: managing children's nutrition on tight budgets, monitoring developmental milestones without paediatric access, navigating fragmented healthcare systems, compensating for inconsistent schooling, and regulating household emotions under chronic stress. Behaviourally, this represents sophisticated automaticity under constraint, the ability to maintain complex decision trees when bandwidth is already depleted.

The Language of Invisible Labour

Two concepts from neighbouring cultures help articulate what often goes unnamed:

- 気遣い (kizukai) in Japanese: proactive, quiet attentiveness

- 배려 (baeryeo) in Korean: anticipatory consideration rooted in care

These mirror what Indonesian mothers do daily, often unconsciously: predicting needs before they surface, smoothing transitions, preventing friction. This attentional labour becomes invisible because it's constant. Its absence would be immediately felt; its presence rarely acknowledged.

The Last Mile, Repeated Daily

In many households I work with, hesitation meets urgency rather than patience. Not because mothers are less nurturing, but because they operate in environments with thinner margins for error. One forgotten homework assignment might mean a punitive teacher's response. One missed meal preparation might mean children going hungry. One moment of inattention might cascade into a crisis. This isn't a parenting deficit, it's a context-dependent adaptation. The behavioural response matches the environmental stakes.

The Impossible Standard

Society places impossibly high expectations on mothers: maintain the household, care for all family members, and manage everyone's emotional well-being. And when economic necessity demands it, add income-earning to that list, without subtracting anything else. This isn't a balanced equation. It's an accumulation of roles, each supposedly done "well," with no corresponding reduction in other responsibilities. Work outside the home doesn't reduce the work inside it; it compounds the cognitive load.

Identity as Fuel and Burden

Cultural narratives of motherhood reinforce these expectations through identity. The ibu yang baik identity becomes intertwined with moral worth, being a "good mother" means meeting these impossible standards without complaint. Mothers push through exhaustion not because conditions support this effort, but because not doing so would challenge their fundamental sense of self. This creates a behavioural paradox, extraordinary perseverance amid limited resources, accompanied by limited recognition. The system depends on this identity-driven motivation while offering little structural support in return.

Research on cash transfers reveals this pattern starkly. When mothers receive financial aid, they overwhelmingly allocate it toward family needs, children's nutrition, education, healthcare, and household stability. This isn't just altruism; it's become identity. The evidence consistently shows that resources given to mothers become resources for families, because maternal identity is defined through family well-being rather than individual need.

Inequality as Cognitive Burden

What emerges clearly is that inequality isn't only material, it's cognitive. Low-income Indonesian mothers perform more behavioural labour precisely because they have less structural support. They compensate for institutional gaps through personalised, high-effort strategies. When forced to choose between household management, childcare, and income generation, they don't choose, they attempt all three simultaneously, absorbing the cognitive cost themselves.

They become de facto behavioural designers, continuously testing, adjusting, and optimising within severe constraints. When cash transfers arrive, the optimization continues: that money flows toward children's school fees, nutritious food, medicine, toward family survival and advancement. This allocation pattern reflects how deeply maternal identity is structured around family well-being, even when mothers themselves remain depleted. Sadly, this behavioural labour remains invisible in policy design.

Making the Invisible Visible

For behavioural interventions to be effective and equitable, this invisible labour must first be seen. When we design nudges, choice architectures, or behaviour change programmes, we often treat the individual as a blank slate, forgetting they may already be running sophisticated behavioural algorithms adapted to their circumstances. Interventions that ignore this existing expertise risk adding burden rather than reducing it. These mothers are already behavioural scientists in practice, conducting daily experiments, managing cognitive load, navigating identity-motivation dynamics, and building resilience systems with whatever resources exist.

The task now is ensuring their expertise is acknowledged, valued, and structurally supported rather than simply expected and exploited.

*The author conducts community-based work with low-income families in Indonesia, examining how behavioural patterns emerge within structural constraints.