A Social Values Analysis of Parental Decision Making

ABSTRACT

Social values theory was used to examine how parents make decisions for their adolescent children. Social values theory states that decision making for others is based on the social value of an action, leading to a norm for how to decide for others, whereas self decisions are influenced by a number of additional factors. Consistent with a risk-aversion norm, in hypothetical health and safety scenarios parents made more risk-averse decisions for their adolescent children than for themselves. Further, the level of risk and inconvenience affected self decisions more than decisions for one's child. A second study showed that the norm was stronger for decisions for one's child than for oneself and more related to parents’ decisions for their child than for themselves. In sum, parents’ decisions for their children seem to be largely determined by a norm stating how they are supposed to decide, at least in the domain of health and safety. Implications for both the judgment and decision making and parenting literatures are discussed.

Keywords:

• decision making for others
• parenting
• Social Values Theory
• vaccination

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Corrigendum

Notes

¹Interestingly, the tendency to make more risk-averse decisions for one's child than for oneself was stronger when these decisions were made for a boy than for a girl, as seen in exploratory ANOVAs where we included child gender as an independent variable. In the seatbelt scenario, parents of boys made more risk-averse decisions for their child (M = 9.48) than for themselves (M = 8.13). Parents of girls likewise made more risk-averse decisions for their child (M = 9.53) than for themselves (M = 9.02), but this difference was smaller, interaction F (1, 97) = 4.33, p =.04, partial η² =.043. Similarly, in the vaccination scenario, parents of boys made more risk-averse decisions for their child (M = 7.66) than for themselves (M = 6.42), whereas parents of girls had a smaller difference (M = 7.29 vs. M = 6.57), interaction F (1, 97) = 3.94, p =.05, partial η² =.039. We want to emphasize that these analyses were exploratory (we tested other demographic features as well) and were not replicated in Study 2; thus, it is plausible that they just reflect a type 1 error. At the least, however, these findings indicate that our results were not just due to our participants making particularly cautious decisions for girls, as, if anything, the tendency to make more risk-averse decisions for one's child is stronger for parents of boys than for girls.

²One exception, however, was a significant three-way interaction between target, risk, and order in the vaccine scenario, F (1, 98) = 11.60, p =.001, partial η² =.106. When participants responded for themselves first, there was a highly significant simple 2-way interaction between target and risk level whereby the risk manipulation had a stronger effect on self decisions than on child decisions, F (1, 51) = 22.46, p <.001, partial η² =.306. However, when participants made decisions for their child first, there was no simple 2-way interaction between target and risk level indicating that risk level affected decisions for both targets to an equal extent, F (1, 47) = 0.11, p =.74, partial η² =.002. One potential explanation for this effect is that when participants made decisions for themselves first and for their child second, the decisions for the child in the low-risk situation were already quite risk-averse, producing a ceiling on how much increasing risk could increase risk aversion when decisions were made for one's child.

³To confirm our assumption that different reference groups influence self and child decision making norms, we asked questions at the end of the questionnaire about how much these different groups influence the decisions participants make in their everyday lives, both for themselves and for their children. Participants responded on a 1 to 7 scale from “not at all” to “very much.” A 2 (Target: self vs. child) × 2 (Reference group: “other parents of adolescents” vs. “other adults you know”) ANOVA showed that, as expected, there was an interaction between Target and Reference Group, F (1,212) = 31.29, p <.001. In particular, participants reported that other parents of adolescents (M = 3.29) influence their decisions for their child more than do other adults generally (M = 2.87), t (212) = 5.43, p <.001, but other parents of adolescents (M = 2.85) do not influence their decisions for themselves any more than other adults generally (M = 2.84), t (212).

⁴There were a number of order effects on both dependent measures. Specifically, those participants in the self first condition made more risk-averse decisions overall and perceived a stronger norm (averaged across all conditions) than did participants who were in the child first condition (both p's <.04). As in Experiment 1, these main effects appear to be due to participants knowing that they wanted to make more risk-averse decisions for their child than for themselves, but being unclear on how to interpret the scale initially to indicate the desired level of risk aversion. There were a number of interactions with order as well, which appear to have resulted from this fact, in that participants adjusted less from values closer to the floor or ceiling. Although these effects were relatively strong, they are theoretically uninteresting for the present purposes, and we thus do not discuss them further.