Exploring Relations between Beliefs about the Genetic Etiology of Virtue and the Endorsement of Parenting Practices

SYNOPSIS

Objective. We investigated associations between adults’ beliefs about the heritability of virtue and endorsements of the efficacy of specific parenting styles. Design. In Studies 1 (N = 405) and 2 (N = 400), beliefs about both the genetic etiology of virtuous characteristics and parenting were assessed in samples of parents and non-parents. In Study 3 (N = 775), participants were induced to view virtue as determined by genes or as determined by social factors. Heritability beliefs and authoritarian parenting endorsements were subsequently measured. Results. Study 1 and Study 2 converged to reveal that tendencies to view characteristics as determined by genes were positively associated with endorsement of authoritarian parenting styles. This association occurred independent of individual differences in essentialism and right-wing authoritarianism. Study 3 revealed that exposure to genetic accounts of virtue increased beliefs that virtue is caused by genes, which in turn was positively associated with endorsements of authoritarian parenting responses to child problem behavior. Exposure to genetic accounts of virtue increased endorsement of authoritarian parenting among parents, but was unrelated to authoritarian parenting among non-parents. Conclusions. These studies suggest that genetic accounts of virtuous characteristics reliably relate to more positive beliefs about harsh and controlling parenting practices, illuminating an unrecognized cognitive factor associated with authoritarian parenting endorsement.

ADDRESSES AND AFFILIATIONS

Matthew Vess, 4235 TAMU, College Station, TX 77840. Email: [email protected]. Grace N. Rivera and Rebecca J. Brooker are at Texas A&M University. Matt Stichter is at Washington State University. Jenae M. Neiderhiser is at The Pennsylvania State University.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of Interest Disclosures

Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical Principles

The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Role of the Funders/Sponsors

None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Notes

¹ Biological essentialism and genetic essentialism are distinct concepts, with genetic attributions being a specific kind of biological attribution. We suspect that lay understandings of biological versus genetic attributions substantially overlap. We therefore utilized this validated measure of biological essentialism to assess lay genetic essentialist beliefs.

² For all studies, we also collected information about participants’ race, ethnicity, sex, age, marital status, and annual household income as an assessment of sociodemographic variables. For participants who indicated they were parents, we asked whether they were biological parents and to report the number, age, and gender of their children. In Study 3, we collected an additional measure of subjective SES.

³ The characteristics referred to in this scale are not specific individual characteristics such as height or extraversion; rather, these items ask participants to consider individuals and their constellations of characteristics more broadly, using language like “kind of person someone is” or “basic qualities that a person has.” The full measure is available on OSF.

⁴ Both the composite measures and the subscales of these parenting measures are available in the datasets on OSF for interested readers.

⁵ When endorsement of all three parenting styles are entered along with RWA and the other facets of essentialism, permissiveness is significantly associated with biological essentialism and the association between authoritarian parenting endorsement and biological essentialism becomes marginally significant. These analyses are provided in the supplemental materials, but are conceptually and empirically distinct from models that just isolate the variance in genetic essentialism that covaries with the endorsement of each parenting style independent of each other.

Additional information

Funding

This project was made possible through the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation [Grant: 58792] through its project on Genetics and Human Agency. The opinions expressed in this project are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.