Marlis M. Schneider

Parents' beliefs about their children's abilities shape parental behavior and decision-making. But do parents process information about their children's abilities objectively or in a biased way? I study this question in a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment with Norwegian elementary school students and their parents (N = 743 parent–child pairs) to examine how parents update beliefs when receiving noisy signals about their child's performance in a cognitive (mathematics) or a non-cognitive (prosociality) skill. In mathematics, updating is symmetric, with parents being similarly responsive to both positive and negative signals. In prosociality, by contrast, parents update their beliefs more strongly to good signals but are significantly less responsive to negative signals. The asymmetry is particularly pronounced when signals are framed as reflecting parents' own traits. Following negative prosocial signals, parents engage in ex-post rationalization: they rate their child's effort and the relevance of the signals as lower. Survey evidence indicates that these domain differences stem from two factors: parents are better informed about their child's performance in mathematics, and they view prosociality as more central to their child's broader life success. Biased belief updating thus emerges when information is sparse and outcomes are ego-relevant, with important implications for how feedback is designed and delivered in educational contexts.

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.

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.

Using a representative sample of U.S. parents, we examine how parents perceive the pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to investments in their children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We explore whether perceived returns vary by the child's initial level of skills or by gender, particularly in light of growing concerns about boys' under-performance in both academic and behavioral dimensions. Finally, we investigate how these perceptions relate to actual parental investment decisions.