Marlis M. Schneider

Parents' beliefs inform their behavior -- but when confronted with information about their children, do they revise beliefs rationally, or are they subject to bias? To address this question, I conduct a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment in Norway involving elementary school children (aged 11–12) and their parents. In the experiment, parents receive noisy but unbiased signals about their child's relative performance in one of two randomized domains: mathematics or prosociality. I experimentally manipulate the ego-relevance of the signals by highlighting that they are either (i) indicative of the child's future life outcomes or (ii) indicative of the intergenerational transmission of skills between children and parents -- and thus, implicitly, a signal about the parent. This manipulation allows me to identify the mechanism through which parents care about their child's relative performance. I evaluate the effects relative to a baseline condition without additional information. Parents are initially overconfident in their children's performance. Compared to a rational Bayesian benchmark, they update conservatively in both domains in response to the signals. However, differences emerge between the domains. While belief updating in mathematics is symmetric (i.e., parents are responding equally to positive and negative signals) and unaffected by the information condition, in prosociality, parents exhibit asymmetric updating by overweighting positive signals when these carry direct or indirect ego-relevance. Behavioral responses suggest motivated beliefs. For example, parents downplay negative signals in the prosocial domain. The findings highlight how ego-relevant motives shape belief updating about children's performance in contexts central to human capital formation.

This paper studies how parents shape the ego-relevant information children receive about themselves and how it influences the beliefs and behavior of children. Using a field experiment with 7th-grade Norwegian students and their parents, we show that parents provide their children with feedback that is systematically more favorable than parents' private beliefs. Children incorporate this positively biased feedback into their self-assessments. The gap between parents' private beliefs and communicated feedback is larger when feedback precedes task completion, suggesting motivational intent. The study contributes to the understanding of how social transmission of self-relevant information, rather than just individual cognitive biases, shapes overconfidence.

Individuals are sensitive to cues about economic conditions in ways that affect their beliefs and behavior. This paper experimentally tests how parents’ perceptions of children’s mobility prospects affect parental investments of time and money in child skill development. An experiment involving approximately 1,000 parents of children aged 5–17 aimed to shift parents’ beliefs regarding the possibility of future upward (downward) economic mobility in US society. We find that parents are responsive to signals about their children’s future economic mobility prospects. Using a novel measure of time investment, parents who are prompted to consider favorable prospects for their children increase their time investments to enhance their children’s skills and report being more willing to pay for resources to achieve this aim. These parents also strengthen their beliefs about the returns on parental investments, highlighting a plausible mechanism. Effects on beliefs and behavior are consistent across parents of varying income and educational levels.

Two studies examine how American parents’ beliefs about the economy affect their support for policies and behaviors that give them and their child a “leg up,” even when this comes at the cost of other families’ access to educational and economic opportunities. Counterintuitively, the results show that believing in the American Dream increases affluent parents’ likelihood of engaging in such opportunity hoarding. In other words, affluent parents responded to the possibility that other people would be able to climb the socioeconomic ladder by trying to secure their own children’s future opportunities and limiting those available to less affluent parents and their children. These findings deepen understandings of the factors that contribute to rising economic inequalities.