Don't blame the parents

Children don't get their values from their parents. That's the message of this new paper.
The authors got parents and chidren to play a public goods game, in which subjects could choose between giving money to a group and getting a high return to the group or keeping money for themselves and free-riding.
And they found that there was no correlation at all between parents' contributions and their childrens'. The children of pro-social parents were no more likely to be pro-social than the children of free-riding parents.
This doesn't mean the family has no influence upon attitudes. The authors found that children from large families were less likely to contribute to the public good, perhaps because competition for attention and resources within the family made them more selfish.
What it does suggest, though, is that even youngish children don't learn values such as altruism and selfishness from their parents. It also suggests that self-assessment isn't reliable.
Environment, then, seems to matter more than family.

Comments

[Mark Wadsworth]

"Environment, then, seems to matter more than family"

Isn't the family part of your environment? That said, things like altruism are inborn and not learned.

[Scratch]

Age matters more than environment or family.

People under twenty five are barely capable of anything except self gratification and recreational snidery.

God, it was fun.

[Recusant]

No, your DNA, and therefore your born/inate character, matter most. Environment - including family - is just tweaking round the edges.

[Kit]

Does altruism even exist?

[Sam]

Were I inclined to be argumentative, I might offer the suggestion that feelings of social obligation (which are probably a priori most likely to be inherited from parents) would arise in reference to a real public good, but would not arise in reference to an artificial game (even a game which had real money as a prize).

The fact that there's no correlation between the play of parents and children just tells us that game-playing tactics and abilities aren't inherited.

[Rob Spear]

I wonder if their values get more similar to their parents as they reach their parents age?

[Philip Hunt]

Judith Rich Harris, in "The Nurture Assumption", argues that parents don't make a lot of difference to how a child turns out. More importantly, she has statistics to back her up.

[sanbikinoraion]

What Scratch said: surely the age and environment of the children at this part of their lives will have a resounding effect on the outcome of such a study, and I think you're on *very* ropey ground extrapolating that to "children don't get their values from their parents".

More accurate might be "children haven't got their values from their parents YET".

[Matt Munro]

The influence of the family on outcomes is overstated but you can't easily separate "environment" from family - they are part of the social environment, probably a less inflential one than peer group but still an influence, to use an anecdotal example - how many children follow the same profession as their parents ?
The biggest influence of all is DNA and you get all of that from your parents.

[Argumentative Essays]

Stumbling and Mumbling <--------that's what i was looking for