Are Parents Patient? The Influence of Parenting Role Salience and Parental Status on Impatience.

Yuanyuan J Li,Yuanyuan Liu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01523

Abstract

In the classic intertemporal discounting task (Thaler, 1981), individuals make tradeoff decisions between smaller-sooner and larger-later monetary rewards. We explored how parental role salience and parental status influences individual’s choice between smaller-sooner and larger-later choices. Parental role salience is manipulated among both parents and non-parents in this research. Our results show a significant interaction between parental status and manipulated parental role salience. Specifically, we found that parents are more impatient than non-parents. Additionally, non-parents become more impatient after parental role salience manipulation, similar to parents. Theoretical implications of our findings are discussed.

Highlights

Individuals often make tradeoffs between the magnitude and the delivery timing of an outcome, in another word, between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later outcome
This was a 2 × 2 between subjects design with parental status measured and parental role salience manipulated by changing the order of parenthoodrelated questions (Eibach et al, 2009; Eibach and Mock, 2011)
Because parental role salience manipulation and parental status were categorical variables, both variables were coded as dummy variables

Summary

Introduction

Individuals often make tradeoffs between the magnitude and the delivery timing of an outcome, in another word, between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later outcome. Earlier research shows that individuals are impatient and future rewards are often discounted heavily in such tradeoffs (e.g., Frederick et al, 2002). Other factors contribute to future discounting, including opportunity cost consideration (Zhao et al, 2015) and the resource slack hypothesis that people may misperceive their resource abundance in the future than in the present time (Zauberman and Lynch, 2005). Existing research shows that future discounting may be influenced by various factors, including visceral factors (Loewenstein, 1996), certainty of the outcomes (Keren and Roelofsma, 1995; Weber and Chapman, 2005), monetary priming (Jiang et al, 2016), power (Duan et al, 2017), and mental representation (Malkoc et al, 2010). We are interested in the influence of parental role salience on intertemporal choices

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Conclusion