Parents versus peers: Assessing the impact of social agents on decision making in young adulthood

Abstract

Lay theories posit young adults prioritize peer over parent relationships, especially when making decisions. However, no empirical work has directly evaluated how young adults weigh these relationships against one another. We conducted a pre-registered experiment where we pit outcomes for parents against outcomes for friends. Participants played one round of the Columbia Card Task in which gains benefited a parent and losses were incurred by a friend, then played another round where the opposite was true. We also varied the emotional salience of decision making, a moderating influence shown to affect how young adults make decisions. Results showed individuals were more likely to make decisions that benefited a parent at the expense of a friend, compared to the opposite. These results were driven by the low emotional salience condition, whereas individuals showed no preference in the high emotional salience condition. These findings help clarify popular lay theories of young adulthood.

Is social decision making for close others consistent across domains and within individuals?

“…We estimated a logistic random coefficient regression model using the Hierarchical Linear Modeling software (HLM for Windows; Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002) to quantify parent–friend preferences in other-oriented decision making on the CCT. Table 1, Panel A shows that we replicated our prior finding that late adolescents prioritize their parent over their friend during the task (Guassi Moreira et al, 2018). The expected odds of flipping over a card were 35.93% greater in the “parent gain—friend lose” condition compared to the opposite condition (Odds ratio: e 0.303 = 1.3539; Figure 3A).…”

“…An ancillary aim to the study was examining the impact that subjective relationship quality had in shaping decision-making preferences. Although this was a lesser aim, we report results with relationship quality throughout for the purposes of replicating prior work (Guassi Moreira et al, 2018) and addressing a potential mechanism underlying our findings. With exploratory results in hand, Study 2 was then conducted to confirm the results of Study 1 in a larger, independent sample…”

“…We set out to accomplish four research aims in Study 1. First, we aimed to directly replicate our prior findings showing that young adults prioritize parents over friends in a risky decision-making context (Guassi Moreira et al, 2018). Second, we sought to explore whether parent-over-friend preferences would also emerge in the probabilistic learning domain.…”

“…Importantly, trait adjectives were obtained from a prior study on other-oriented social decision making that used the same parent–friend nomination/salience procedure (described above). That we used traits which individuals from our target population (i.e., a college aged young adult sample, sampled in Guassi Moreira et al, 2018) have previously used to describe their close others is noteworthy because it, in theory, enhances the ecological validity of the task. To avoid valence biases (see Chavez et al, 2017), a third of the selected traits were positively valenced, another third were neutral traits, and the final third were negative traits.…”

“…Second, learning from past rewards is an implicit process which is meaningfully different from other, more explicit models of social decision making (Kwak & Huettel, 2016). If individuals hold the same preferences (e.g., parent over friend) in a domain that requires implicit processes (e.g., probabilistic learning) compared to explicit processes (e.g., see prior work in the risk taking domain: Guassi Moreira et al, 2018), this would provide further evidence that social preferences support intuitive, in addition to effortful, psychological processes (e.g., Carlson, Aknin, & Liotti, 2016; Wills et al, 2018). This would speak to the importance of certain close relationships, that said relationships influence spontaneous and implicit processes to drive goal pursuit in their favor.…”