Parents systematically overestimate how closely their children adopt their own attitudes

Evidence

My own research with the RWA Scale establishes the following family feud by the time the students enter university. The parents want their children to have virtually the same RWA Scale attitudes they do. The children know it. The parents believe that they have largely succeeded, that their children are scaled-down versions of themselves. But they misperceive, for the fit between their own and their children’s RWA scores, as we saw earlier, averages only about . (EOF, pp. 63-64). That boils down to about . per year of serving up the corn pone to a twenty-year-old. (If the . all came with the DNA, of course, the rate of return on our socialization efforts crumbles to .00. Maybe that’s why we resist genetic explanations so.) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 982

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The imagined child of pregnancy always disappoints against the real one — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1490