Black, But Not White, Families Talked More About Race After The Murder of George Floyd

By Emily Reynolds

Conversations about race can be seriously beneficial to children. Research has highlighted multiple positive outcomes for young people of all backgrounds — enhanced ability to accept different viewpoints and perspectives, increased levels of empathy, a better understanding of their own identity, and less racial bias to name but a few. Yet some parents are still unwilling to take the time to have such conversations.

A new study, published in PNAS, finds that readiness to have such conversations has a lot to do with the racial identity of parents themselves. Looking at family conversations in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the Stanford University team finds that even in the context of the global conversation that followed the racially charged killing, White parents were far less willing to have conversations about race than their Black peers.

Participants, who were either Black or White parents of children aged 0-18 living in the United States, were initially recruited in April 2020, six weeks before Floyd’s murder. First, participants indicated whether or not they have conversations with their children about race, racial inequality and racial identity, as well as how often those conversations were instigated. They were also asked to share a recent conversation they had had with their child, and rated how worried they were that their child might be a target of racial bias or might be racially biased towards others. Another set of parents also completed these measures two months later, in June 2020.

The results showed that, overall, a higher proportion of Black parents discussed race, racial inequality and racial identity than White parents. After the murder of George Floyd Black parents became more likely to discuss inequality, but White parents did not. There were also striking differences when it came to conversations about identity: Black parents remained just as likely to discuss being Black with their children after the murder of Floyd — but White parents were actually less likely to discuss being White.

Among just those parents who discussed these topics, Black parents increased the frequency they spoke about them with their children after the murder, while White parents maintained the same frequency as before.

The next focus of analysis was the content of parents’ conversations, shared through open-ended answers. White parents were more likely to give their children colour-blind messages — one White parent, for example, reported telling their child that “the colour of your skin doesn’t matter”. But Black parents had far more realistic conversations with their children, preparing them to experience racial bias, police targeting, and injustice. Interestingly, White parents were also more likely to share colour-blind sentiments after Floyd’s murder.

Black parents were also more worried that their children would not only be targets of racial bias but actually biased themselves — but White parents had a low level of worry on both counts, and this remained low even after Floyd’s murder, perhaps suggesting a further resistance to engaging with questions of race.

So, overall, Black parents were both more willing to engage in questions of race than White parents and more willing to explore issues of injustice after a particularly traumatic event. White parents were also more likely to engage in conversations about race not mattering: colour-blindness, while potentially well-meaning, is ultimately unproductive as it reduces people’s willingness and ability to identify and engage with racial inequality. In the US, where the study took place, race certainly does matter.

The authors of the study note that part of White parents’ reluctance to talk about race could be down to simply not knowing how to address the subject, and suggest that work could be done on the effectiveness of different strategies. Future research could also look at why White parents are so unwilling to have such conversations. Do they feel uncomfortable and out of their depth? Do they (wrongly) think children are too young to understand? Or is it that they simply don’t care? As the team puts it: “given the reality and brutality of racism and racial inequality, the time to answer these questions, and to have these conversations, is now.”

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/11/01/black-but-not-white-families-talked-more-about-race-after-the-murder-of-george-floyd/(accessed 1.11.21)

People Prefer Strangers Who Share Their Political Views To Friends Who Don’t

August 11, 2020

By Emily Reynolds

Friendship tends to be based on some kind of shared experience: growing up with someone, working with them, or having the same interests. Politics is an important factor too, with research suggesting that we can be pretty intolerant of those with different political positions — not an ideal starting point for friendship.

This can have a significant and tangible impact. One Reuters/Ipsos poll, for example, found 16.4% of people had stopped talking to a family member or friend after Trump was elected, while 17.4% had blocked someone they care about on social media.

So what happens when you find out a trusted friend has different politics to you? They don’t fare well, according to a new study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships authored by Elena Buliga and Cara MacInnis from the University of Calgary, Canada.

Participants were recruited from across the political spectrum: 70 identified as Republicans, whilst 142 described themselves as Democrats. As well as reporting their political identity, participants rated their opinions on social and economic policy, on a scale from very liberal (0) to very conservative (10). They also rated how important their political orientation is to their identity and completed a “feeling thermometer”, which measured  how favourably or unfavourably they felt towards members of other political parties.

After the pre-test measures were complete, participants were presented with four vignettes in a random order. In the first, participants were asked to imagine meeting someone at a party with the same political views as them; another vignette detailed the same experience, only this time the potential friend had different political views.

In the final two vignettes, participants were instructed to think about a real or hypothetical close friend whose views they were not already aware of and asked to imagine a conversation in which their friend outlined their political beliefs. In the first, participants imagined their friend espousing a shared political belief, while in the second they turned out to be a member of a political out-group instead.

After reading each of the four vignettes, participants rated how excited, happy, pleased, satisfied, surprised, upset, anxious and worried they would feel in the situation and answered questions on how willing they would be to maintain that friendship (e.g. “would you make an effort to spend time with this person?”). They also rated their trust and satisfaction in, and hope for, the ongoing friendship.

Finally, participants indicated how much they would expect their feelings to change towards the person in each vignette, as well as rating attitudes towards them from “extremely unfavourable” to “extremely favourable”.

Overall, people were more positive towards in-group members than out-group members: participants had more trust in and hope for the longevity of relationships with both friends and strangers of the same political leanings as them than they did even for established friends with different politics. Positive emotions were highest when discovering a friend had shared beliefs, followed by the stranger with shared beliefs. Out-group friends and out-group strangers tailed behind.

Negative affect was also highest for the friend with different political views, followed by the out-group stranger. This makes sense — you’re likely to be much more invested (and therefore much more disappointed) in a friend than someone you don’t know.

It wasn’t clear, however, who exactly participants were imagining when asked to think of a friend, meaning there may have been significant variation in closeness and therefore in emotional response; some participants may also have been thinking of a hypothetical friend, which could also have had an impact on the results. The measures also only looked at immediate reactions — it’s very possible that after discovering a friend is of a different political persuasion,  participants could calm down or mellow out over a longer period of time.

It’s probably also important to note that the results aren’t necessarily going to represent every relationship — lots of people have cherished friends with very different politics to their own. How those relationships are successfully managed and navigated may be one focus for future research.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/08/11/people-prefer-strangers-who-share-their-political-views-to-friends-who-dont/#more-40038(accessed 13.8.20)

Self-Compassion Can Protect You From Feeling Like A Burden When You Mess Things Up For Your Group

By guest blogger Itamar Shatz

It feels bad to know that you’ve messed up, especially when other people have to pay a price for your actions. Unfortunately, this feeling is something that most of us end up experiencing at one point or another — when we’re placed on a team with other people at school or at a job, for instance, and make a mistake that forces our team members to do more work as a result.

However, recent research, published in Social Psychology by James Wirth at Ohio State University and his colleagues, shows that there is a trait that can reduce those negative feelings, called “self-compassion”.



Self-compassion is composed of three components: self-kindness, which involves showing kindness to yourself, mindfulness, which involves keeping your emotions balanced, and common humanity, which involves recognising that everyone experiences challenges. Past work has shown that self-compassion can be beneficial from an emotional perspective, for example by protecting people who write about their emotional pain, and by helping people with chronic pain lead happier and more active lives.

To see whether self-compassion could also protect people from the negative feelings that occur when they perform poorly in a way that hurts their group, the researchers conducted a series of online experiments, each with around 160 to 300 participants.

In the first experiment, participants imagined playing a trivia game as part of a team. Some imagined that they performed as well as their team members, while others imagined that they performed poorly, and thus reduced the team’s number of correct answers.

In the second experiment, participants actually engaged in a team task, in which they saw three words, and had to find a fourth word that linked them together. Some participants were told that they performed as well as their team members (who were actually computer agents), while others were told that they performed worse and that as a result, the team did not get enough answers correct and would have to answer more questions as a penalty.

In both cases, when people performed (or imagined performing) poorly, they experienced more negative emotions, suffered from lower self-esteem, felt more burdensome and ostracised, and expected more exclusion from other group members.

However, self-compassion significantly reduced these negative outcomes: participants who were high in self-compassion did not experience as many negative emotions and concerns over being a burden as those who were low in self-compassion.

In two further experiments, the researchers attempted to untangle the effects of poor performance from those of harming one’s group. In one experiment, participants were either asked to recall a time when their poor performance harmed members of their group, or when they performed poorly but not in a way that harmed their group. In the other, participants engaged in the same word creativity task as before. This time, however, all participants were told that they performed worse than their team members, but some were told that their team would be impacted by this, while others were told that there would be no harm to their team.

These studies showed that when their poor performance also harmed other members of their group, participants felt more negative social consequences, such as feeling burdensome. Again, self-compassion seemed to buffer against these negative effects.

The study does have some limitations, as the researchers themselves note. For example, the experiments were conducted in an online setting, where participants did not directly experience the in-person social interaction that plays an important role in these kinds of situations. Still, it’s encouraging that most of the study’s main findings replicated across all of the individual experiments.

Overall, these findings help explain why some people feel crushed when they make mistakes, while others manage to cope well. Furthermore, they suggest that practising self-compassion might help you cope with difficult situations where you feel you are being a burden on others. For example, if you’re part of a group project and you make a mistake, you could benefit from reminding yourself that everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself if you do so. If you’re someone who’s not naturally self-compassionate, this may be difficult, but as the researchers note, with enough practice, it might be possible to increase your self-compassion over time.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/07/02/self-compassion-can-protect-you-from-feeling-like-a-burden-when-you-mess-things-up-for-your-group/(accessed 6.7.20)

Why Are We So Quick To Scrutinise How Low-Income Families Spend Their Money?

By Matthew Warren

As shops re-opened in the UK this week, social media users were quick to pour scorn on the hundreds of eager shoppers who queued up to get in. Yes, it’s unclear whether it was a good decision to re-open businesses — but there was a certain snobbishness to many of these posts. Most of the ire was directed at those lining up outside Primark, which sells clothes at prices more affordable to those on low incomes than most other high street stores. Meanwhile, queues also formed outside high-end shops like Selfridges and Harrods — but these shoppers somehow escaped the wrath of most social media commentators.

This situation seems to reflect a broader inequality in how we judge other people’s purchase decisions: we’re much more willing to scrutinise — or even dictate — how people on lower incomes spend their money compared to those on higher incomes. There are countless examples of this — think of the low-income mother who is criticised for treating her children to a rare meal out, or the refugee who is shamed for owning a smartphone.

Now a new study in PNAS provides some clues as to the origins of this bias. Across a series of 11 studies involving more than 4,000 participants, Serena Hagerty and Kate Barasz from Harvard Business School find that we tend to believe lower-income people need less than those on higher incomes, and that this in turn restricts our perceptions about what is acceptable for this group to buy.

In the first couple of studies, participants read about Joe, who was described as having either a low- or high-paying job. They learned that Joe had won a $200 gift card which he spent on a flat screen TV. They then rated five statements which measured how “permissible” they thought his purchase was (e.g. “He made a responsible purchasing decision” and “He deserves to buy what he did”). Those who read that Joe had a low income rated his purchase as less permissible than those who read that he had a high income, or who were given no information about his income.

In a subsequent study, participants read about a woman looking for a child’s car seat who ultimately chooses to buy the more expensive of two options. Again, those who read she had a low income thought her decision was less permissible than those who read she had a high income. In fact, the team observed the same pattern for a range of products: participants who rated the permissibility of 20 different goods and services, from household appliances to pet products, indicated that almost all of these were less acceptable for a lower-income person to buy.

So people clearly think that purchasing the very same product is often less acceptable for a low-income than high-income individual — but why is that the case? The researchers thought it could come down to people’s perceptions of the needs of others. So, in the next few studies, they looked at which purchases participants deemed necessary.

The team repeated the car seat scenario, for instance, finding that those who read that the mother was on a low income believed that the purchase was less necessary than those who read she was on a high income. Similarly, in another study, participants read about a low- or high-income family looking for a new house, and were asked to rate how necessary it was that the house had 20 different features, such as a garage or storage space. Of these 20 features, 17 were rated as more necessary for the high-income family. Disturbingly, these even included basic requirements like “close to hospitals” or “a neighbourhood that is safe/secure”.

These findings suggest that people believe low-income individuals need particular items less than high-income individuals — and further studies showed that purchases that were considered less necessary were, in turn, considered less permissible.

Finally, the researchers demonstrated that these perceptions actually influence people’s behaviour. In one study, participants could help a hypothetical family decide what to buy. Participants who read that the family was on a low income were much less likely to allocate money to “low permissibility” products like a television than those in the high-income condition. And when deciding whether to gift a low-income individual either a $100 grocery voucher or a $200 electronics voucher, only a quarter of participants went for the latter, even though it was worth twice as much. More than half said they would give a high-income individual the electronics voucher, however. “Paradoxically, the result was that participants effectively allocated more money to higher-income people than lower-income people,” the authors note.

These last findings have worrying implications when it comes to thinking about charitable donations or how resources are distributed to the less fortunate, write the authors. If people hold such a narrow view of the needs of those on lower incomes, then it’s easy to see how resources could be allocated disproportionately to the most basic necessities — food and housing, say — while ignoring higher-level needs that are seen as less “permissible” — access to the internet or to recreation facilities, for instance.

The research could also help explain why it is so common to hear politicians and opinion writers moralising about what poorer people should and should not spend their money on, or why state provisions for those on lower incomes often barely meet the most basic standard. “In essence,” the researchers conclude, “people seem to conceptualize necessity differently for lower-income versus higher-income others, such that the “wants” of the poor evolve into the “needs” of the wealthier.”

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/06/16/why-are-we-so-quick-to-scrutinise-how-low-income-families-spend-their-money/(accessed 22.6.20)

Struggling To Stick To A Workout Routine? Copying Your Friends Might Help

By Emily Reynolds

Keeping to goals or new habits is not easy — so much so that there’s a cottage industry of life coaches, motivational speakers and stationery companies offering you tricks, hints, motivational journals and other products apparently designed to keep you on the straight and narrow.

But there might be an easier — and considerably cheaper — way of doing things. Rather than trying to motivate ourselves alone, Katie S. Mehr and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania argue in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, copying the strategies that our friends use may provide us with some much needed drive.



The team asked 1,028 participants, all of whom said they wanted to exercise more, how many hours they’d spent exercising in the previous week, before randomly assigning them to one of three conditions.

Participants in the “copy-paste” condition were asked to pay attention to how people they knew motivated themselves to work out, and were told they could ask them directly for strategies and tips. Those in the “quasi-yoked” control condition were told that the research team would “help [them] learn about an effective hack or strategy that motivates people to exercise” — no mention of friends. In another, simple control condition, there was no message.

Two days later, participants completed a second survey, describing what strategies they planned to use in the next week to exercise more. More specifically, those in the copy-paste condition were asked to summarise the strategy they’d copied from a friend, while those in the quasi-yoked condition were provided with one of 358 exercise strategies another participant had copy-pasted in a pilot study.

Finally, a week after the second survey, participants in all conditions were asked how many hours they had spent exercising in the last week and how motivated they had felt to exercise on a scale of one to five.

Those in the copy-paste condition — that is, those who had copied their friends’ fitness strategies — spent significantly more time exercising than those in the simple control (55.8 more minutes on average) and quasi-yoked control condition (32.5 more minutes). They were also more motivated to exercise.

What made copy-paste prompts so effective? To figure this out, the team also asked participants nine questions about the strategies they used, such as how useful, new or appealing the strategies were, and how committed they felt to them. The team found that, compared to the quasi-yoked condition, those in the copy-paste condition found the strategies more useful, were more committed to them, and had more social interactions with others who exercise — and these differences could explain why these participants in turn spent more time exercising.

This makes sense: general advice about exercise or habit-forming may not particularly resonate with someone, while finding appealing strategies from one’s own social circle could be more personally relevant. Further research could look at the nature of the strategies participants “copied and pasted” from their friends: is the motivation of seeking and applying strategies from friends enough to keep somebody interested in their new habit, or do particular types of strategy work better or worse?

Whether copy-paste strategies would work in the long-term is also not yet clear — it’s easy to start a new lifestyle with good intentions and high levels of motivation, but not so easy to keep it up. If you’re looking to change a habit, however, you could do a lot worse than looking to a friend for advice.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/06/11/struggling-to-stick-to-a-workout-routine-copying-your-friends-might-help/(accessed 16.6.20)

People Who Have Lost Their Religion Show “Residues” Of Religious Past In Their Thoughts And Behaviours, Study Claims

By Emma Young

What happens to people when they lose their religion? Do they start to think and act just like people who have never believed — or do they keep some psychological and behavioural traces of their past?

Given the number of people worldwide who report no current religious affiliation (more than 1 billion) and predictions that this will expand into the future, it’s important to explore just how homogenous, or otherwise, this group is, argue the researchers behind a new paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences.

Daryl R. Van Tongeren at Hope College, US, and his colleagues conclude from their studies that there is in fact a “religious residue” that clings to people who cease to identify as religious. “Formerly religious individuals differed from never religious and currently religious individuals in cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes,” the team reports.

Why might such a residue exist? Because for people who are religious, the kinds of attitudes and behaviours that go along with religion are likely to be important to the way those individuals see themselves. Picture someone who grew up in a strongly Christian household, for example, with parents who promoted Christian morals, and who volunteered their time through the church. Even if that person later no longer identifies as Christian, these experiences may have enduring psychological impacts. Our social identities can change, the researchers note, but this usually only happens slowly.

For their first study, the team recruited just over 3,000 nationally representative online participants from the US, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. These people were asked about their religious identity, beliefs and practices, and the extent to which they were exposed to religious behaviours during childhood. Then they completed a (very brief) measure of their subjective prosociality (their perception of their helpfulness towards other people, for example), a scale that measured their social values, and also a test that assessed their attitudes towards God.

The team found that a sizeable proportion — 20.94% — of the participants reported being formerly religious. And, they argue, their data revealed evidence for a religious residue effect. On various measures, including religiosity, self-reported prosociality and prosocial orientation (such as wanting everyone in a group to do well, rather than aiming for individual success), currently religious participants scored the highest, followed by formerly religious and finally never religious people. This was true for each of the three nationalities sampled.

To explore this further, the team ran a second study on 1,626 men and women from the same countries. This time, there were equivalent numbers of never-religious, formerly religious and currently religious participants. And as well as repeating the steps in the first study, these people were given the option of donating a percentage of their participation payment to Save the Children, and also of volunteering to complete another short survey (they could offer anything between 5 and 15 minutes of their time).

Among those who agreed to volunteer for the extra survey, the currently religious gave up more time than both the other groups. Currently religious people also donated more of their money to charity than formerly religious people — but this group in turn donated more than the never religious. This shows that formerly religious people don’t just say they are more prosocial but act in a more prosocial way than never-religious types, the team says.

Well, this particular study seems to show that. But, remember, the participants in both these studies were all first asked about their religious identity. If, as the researchers argue, being prosocial is an important element of being religious, then currently religious, and even previously religious, participants had all just been primed to think of religion, and (whether consciously or not) everything that goes with that. Van Tongeren maintains that as the participants were asked a host of different questions, this is unlikely to be an issue. But I don’t think they can rule out the possibility that this inflated these groups’ prosociality scores.

For the final study, the team shifted to data from New Zealand collected between 2009 and 2017 as part of an annual, longitudinal national sample of registered voters. This revealed that volunteering was about twice as common among religious vs non-religious people. It also showed that the annual chance of a participant losing their religion but still spending time in voluntary or charitable work was much higher than the chance of someone losing their religion and stopping volunteering. This supports the religious residue hypothesis, the researchers argue.

But plenty of non-religious people also volunteered their time. Being the kind of person who volunteers could constitute an important aspect of anyone’s social identity, in and of itself, and so be resistant to change, whether you are religious or not. However, Van Tongeren maintains that the data provides evidence for the “lingering effects of prosociality, even after people stop identifying as religious”.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/05/07/people-who-have-lost-their-religion-show-residues-of-religious-past-in-their-thoughts-and-behaviours-study-claims/#more-39578(accessed 10.5.20)

We Tend To See Acts We Disapprove Of As Deliberate — A Bias That Helps Explain Why Conservatives Believe In Free Will More Than Liberals

By guest blogger Jesse Singal

One of the most important and durable findings in moral and political psychology is that there is a tail-wags-the-dog aspect to human morality. Most of us like to think we have carefully thought-through, coherent moral systems that guide our behaviour and judgements. In reality our behaviour and judgements often stem from gut-level impulses, and only after the fact do we build elaborate moral rationales to justify what we believe and do.

A new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examines this issue through a fascinating lens: free will. Or, more specifically, via people’s judgments about how much free will others had when committing various transgressions. The team, led by Jim A. C. Everett of the University of Kent and Cory J. Clark of Durham University, ran 14 studies geared at evaluating the possibility that at least some of the time the moral tail wags the dog: first people decide whether someone is blameworthy, and then judge how much free will they have, in a way that allows them to justify blaming those they want to blame and excusing those they want to excuse.

The researchers examined this hypothesis, for which there is already some evidence, through the lens of American partisan politics. In the paper they note that previous research has shown that conservatives have a greater belief in free will than liberals, and are more moralising in general (that is, they categorise a larger number of acts as morally problematic, and rely on a greater number of principles — or moral foundations — in making these judgements). The first two of the new studies replicated these findings — this is consistent with the idea, put simply, that conservatives believe in free will more because it allows them to level more moral judgements.

There’s a lot to unpack in the remaining studies, but here are a few of the key findings:

In Study 4, the researchers found that when it came to attribution of free will in instances that were viewed as “equally immoral for liberals and conservatives,” (such as spreading malicious rumours about a co-worker) there was no longer any correlation between participants’ political stance (liberal vs. conservative) and their evaluations of how much free will the transgressor had. This lends support to the idea that “differences in conservatives’ and liberals’ perception of free will may be partially due to differences in moralisation, rather than representing any generalised, abstract belief that human behaviours are freely chosen.”

In Study 5, the researchers found that when they deliberately presented participants with hypothetical acts designed to be viewed as more immoral by liberals — such as “Robert sends a formal complaint to his child’s school after finding that his child’s kindergarten teacher is transgendered” — the normal pattern reversed itself, and it was now liberals who attributed more free will to the actors in question. (This finding was weaker, and only statistically significant when the researchers bumped up their sample beyond its initial size.)

In Study 7, the researchers synthesised the aforementioned findings and randomly assigned online participants recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to situations in which the person committing a bad act was either described as liberal or conservative and as acting in order to achieve liberal or conservative goals. After confirming that the MTurk respondents viewed moral harms against their own political group more harshly, the researchers also found “tentative — but weak — evidence” in favour of their overall hypothesis: liberal MTurkers viewed conservative bad actors as having more free will than bad-acting liberals, and conservative MTurkers viewed liberal bad actors as having more free will than bad-acting conservatives. In short, when people take political actions that we morally disapprove of, we’re more inclined to believe they did it of their own volition. This bias afflicts conservatives more often, because they’re more morally disapproving, but can just as easily afflict liberals.

Some of the evidence is mixed, but overall the paper suggests that even judgments about free will (a complex philosophical concept that has been the subject of much debate and introspection) can’t escape the gut-impulse nature that underlies so much human moralising. Though preliminary, this is an important finding that could have ramifications for society. For one thing, if we have a tendency to view agents as more free when their bad acts offend us politically, but as less free when they don’t, that’s the sort of psychological tendency that could be echoed in law enforcement.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/04/14/we-tend-to-see-acts-we-disapprove-of-as-deliberate-a-bias-that-helps-explain-why-conservatives-believe-in-free-will-more-than-liberals/#more-39454(accessed 14.4.20)

The Quality Of The Relationship Between Parents Can Shape Their Children’s Life Paths

By Emily Reynolds

Our relationship with our parents can have a big impact on our life trajectory. Research has found that those of us lied to by caregivers often end up less well-adjusted, that hard workers are more likely to produce children with good work ethics, that cognitive skills can be improved by having talkative parents, and that positive parenting can impact cortisol levels even years later.

But though we might pay less attention to it, how parents relate to one another is also important for children’s long-term development. A new study, published in Demography, has taken a look at affection within parental relationships, finding that loving spousal relationships can have a positive long-term impact on children’s life paths.

The researchers focused on Nepal, which they say provides an interesting backdrop for an investigation into marriage. Marriage has changed significantly in the country over the last few years: marrying for love (as opposed to arranged marriage) is now more common than it used to be, and rates of divorce and premarital cohabitation are also increasing in the country, though remain rare.

Data was gathered from a longitudinal study, where marital relationship quality and the educational and personal progress of children were tracked for twelve years. The first set of data was collected from 151 neighborhoods in the Western Chitwan Valley in 1996. The quality of relationships among married participants was measured by asking partners separately how much they loved their husband or wife on a three-point scale, and participants were also asked whether their spouse had ever beaten them.

To look at how parents’ relationships influenced children’s own marriage behaviour, the researchers then tracked the age at which children married over the next 10 years. In 2008, they also re-interviewed participants, asking mothers whether or not their children had dropped out of school, and if so at what age.

The results suggested that marriage quality was in fact associated with children’s educational prospects. Children with parents who reported greater love for each other were less likely to drop out of school, whilst those whose parents reported less love were more likely to stop education. Children with parents who reported spousal violence were also more likely to drop out.

Educational outcomes were also related to both class and ethnicity: children from ethnic groups with higher social status, from wealthier households, or whose parents had higher educational backgrounds were more likely to remain in education. The relationship between marriage quality and children’s life outcomes was still significant after controlling for these factors.

Children’s own marriage timing was also linked to levels of their parents’ spousal love: the more positive the parental relationship, the later children got married. It’s important to note that in the context of the study, this was considered to be a good thing — in Nepal, later marriage can imply a better match, and that children feel less need to leave the family home at any cost.

So, as expected, the quality of parents’ marriages had a significant impact on their children, both in terms of educational attainment and on their own relationships later in life. However, the findings may not bear out in the rest of the world, where other cultural factors may come into play. There may also have been nuances that were missed in the measures. For instance, participants were asked only about instances of extreme conflict between spouses; conflicts or abuse may have occurred that were more subtle or less extreme than domestic violence, but that had an impact on children nonetheless. Similarly, educational attainment was measured only by when children dropped out of school, failing to take into consideration what students did after leaving school or the grades they achieved.

Limitations aside, the results do pose an interesting question about how spousal relationships impact children. It’s understandable that parents spend much of their time focusing on their interactions with their children — but looking at the way they feel about their partner may be just as useful.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/03/24/the-quality-of-the-relationship-between-parents-can-shape-their-childrens-life-paths/#more-39379(accessed 2.4.20)