Especially if you have kids

How we remember our past can be shaped by the realities of our present. This study examines how changes to present circumstances influence retrospective reports of family income rank at age 16. While retrospective survey data can be used to assess the long-term effects of childhood conditions, present-day circumstances may “anchor” memories, causing shifts in how individuals recall and report past experiences. Using panel data from the 2006–2014 General Social Surveys (8,602 observations from 2,883 individuals in the United States), we analyze how changes in objective and subjective indicators of current social status—income, financial satisfaction, and perceived income relative to others—are associated with changes in reports of childhood income rank, and how this varies by sex and race/ethnicity. Fixed-effects models reveal no significant association between changes in income and in childhood income rank. However, changes in subjective measures of social status show contrasting effects, as increases in current financial satisfaction are associated with decreases in childhood income rank, but increases in current perceived relative income are associated with increases in childhood income rank. We argue these opposing effects follow from theories of anchoring in recall bias. We further find these effects are stronger among males but are consistent across racial/ethnic groups. This demographic heterogeneity suggests that recall bias is not evenly distributed across the population and has important implications for how different groups perceive their own pasts. Our findings further highlight the malleability of retrospective perceptions and their sensitivity to current social conditions, offering methodological insights into survey reliability and recall bias.

Personality traits describe stable differences in how individuals think, feel, and behave and how they interact with and experience their social and physical environments. We assemble data from 46 coh...

Advice on workflows for developing R scripts. How to think about whether an action belongs in the script or elsewhere.

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We assess whether that tempting idea is too good to be true

In a just world there would be more Moomin movies than Marvel movies.

Personality and cognition offer robust frameworks to understand the individual differences associated with externalizing behaviors. However, these literatures h...

There is a widespread belief, in both the scholarly literature and the popular press, that polygyny prevents large numbers of men from marrying by ...

making those hard jobs a little easier ...

Guest lecture by Matt Keller