Parents’ Ambitions and Children’s Competitiveness

Khadjavi, Menusch; Nicklisch, Andreas Article — Accepted Manuscript (Postprint) Parents’ Ambitions and Children’s Competitiveness Journal of Economic Psychology Provided in Cooperation with: Kiel Institute for the World Economy – Leibniz Center for Research on Global Economic Challenges Suggested Citation: Khadjavi, Menusch; Nicklisch, Andreas (2018) : Parents’ Ambitions and Children’s Competitiveness, Journal of Economic Psychology, ISSN 0167-4870, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Vol. 67, pp. 87-102, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2018.05.004 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/233946 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.de Parents’ Ambitions and Children’s Competitiveness ∗ Menusch Khadjavi1& Andreas Nicklisch2,¶ 1Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany, and Kiel Institute for the World Economy 2Hochschule f¨ ur Technik und Wirtschaft Chur, Switzerland, and Research Unit “Need-based Justice and Distribution Procedures” ¶Corresponding author: Center for Economic Policy Research, HTW Chur Comercialstrasse 20, 7000 Chur, Switzerland, e-mail: [email protected] April 18, 2018 Abstract Individual competitiveness is a personality trait of high importance. While substantial differences between individuals have been documented, the sources of this heterogeneity are not well understood. To contribute to this issue we conduct an incentivized field study with pre-school children. We assess the children’s willingness to compete and relate the inclinations to ambitions and preferences of their parents. Parents’ ambitions concerning their children’s success in professional life predict their children’s competitiveness. In particular, children of highly ambitious parents tend to enter competition even if their chances to win are low. High ambitions are related to a relatively low socioeconomic background. Keywords: Children, Competition, Field Experiment, Parents, Socialization, Intergenerational Transmission JEL-Classification: C91, C93, D01 ∗We gratefully acknowledge the many useful comments provided by participants at several conferences as well as the editor Lionel Page and two anonymous referees. We are indebted to the administrations of the two Kindergartens of our study for making this study possible and to Berno B¨ uchel for excellent research assistance. This research is partly supported by the German Research Foundation (Ni 1610/1-1) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (100019E178317/1). 1 This is the accepted version of an article in Journal of Economic Psychology 67 (2018), pp. 87-102, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2018.05.004 © 2018. This manuscript is made available under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. 1 Introduction A key characteristic of most modern societies is their emphasis on competition. Firms compete for customers, employees compete for promotions and bonuses, and politicians compete for voters. Indeed competition increases welfare and productivity in many settings, for instance labor contracts (Lazear and Rosen, 1981), and can result in joy of winning (Dohmen et al., 2011). The ubiquitous emphasis of competition may however also be a burden for those individuals who experience losing frequently, resulting in stress, depression and connected health costs (e.g., Dohmen et al., 2011; Gilbert et al., 2009). Several studies show that competition for school placement and competition in classrooms negatively affects the quality of learning and other social aspects of students (e.g., Belfield and Levin, 2002; Ladd and Fiske, 2003). Consequently, it is crucial to choose one’s competitions wisely. Little is known about the origins of immanent preferences for competition. Our study provides evidence on factors that shape preferences for competition already in their early childhood. Our data suggests that an important factor triggering children’s competitiveness are parents’ ambitions for their child’s later success in professional life. That is, parents’ high ambitions are likely to be associated with their children to enter competition regardless of their chances to win. A number of studies analyze whether gender causes differences in the competitiveness of children: Gneezy and Rustichini (2004) as well as Sutter and R¨ utzler (2014) find greater competitiveness among boys in a running task, particularly for older children. The authors relate this finding to the tremendous degree of overconfidence concerning the rank of their performance of – especially older – boys. Other authors cannot confirm this result for other tasks (Khachatryan, 2012; Dreber et al., 2011; Samak, 2013), or present mixed evidence regarding decisions to compete and the improvement of performance (C´ ardenas et al., 2012). One potential reason for this mixed picture may be different cultures in the countries where the children grew up. Psychologists, and very recently also economists, test another potential origin of preferences for competition: they link different degrees of competitiveness to family factors (e.g., Hupp et al., 2010; McKee and Leader, 1955; Poulin-Dubois et al., 2002; Van Lange et al., 1997).1For 1Recent studies by Bauer et al. (2014), Dohmen et al. (2012) and Kosse and Pfeiffer (2012) have taken the same avenue linking other-regarding preferences, risk preferences and patience to their parents’ attitudes. All three studies find correlations between parents’ and children’s preferences suggesting that the transmission of preferences from parents to their children is a key driver for these personality traits. Likewise, Deckers et al. (2015) show that parental socioeconomic status significantly influences patience and risk attitude: children from families with higher socioeconomic status are more patient and are less risk seeking. 2 instance, McKee and Leader (1955) analyze behavior of 112 three-to-four-year old children in child-care institutions in the Bay Area. They report that children in child-care institutions in low-class residential areas were more inclined towards competition compared to children from middle-class areas. Van Lange et al. (1997) measure competitiveness of 631 Dutch adults with the social value orientation method and relate their data to background information. Notably, they find that subjects with more siblings are more pro-socially oriented, but less competitionoriented compared to those with fewer siblings. Alm˚ as et al. (2015) explore the relation between children’s willingness to compete and the socio-economic background of their families among Norwegian adolescents, 14 to 15 years old. One of their key findings is that children from families with low income and low education are less willing to compete (even when controlling for performance). In our study, we provide an investigation on another source of intergenerational socialization: we test whether parents’ preferences and ambitions with respect to their children’s success associates with children’s competitiveness. In order to allow for maximal relevance of the family background on children’s decision, we analyze the behavior of very young children. Our investigation comprises an experimental task with 84 pre-school children in Northern Germany. Like other recent studies, we borrow a running task from Gneezy and Rustichini (2004). The design allows us to measure children’s willingness to compete in a familiar task which appears to be easily comprehensible for three to six year-old children, and where competing is ‘natural’. Prior to the experiment, we sent out consent forms including a short survey to the parents. Importantly, neither the parents nor the kindergarten teachers knew the task and research question. The survey included questions concerning topics which are related and unrelated to competitiveness. We collected information on parents’ values and ambitions concerning their children. Our results indicate hardly any gender differences in competitiveness at this very young age. Likewise, parents’ preferences do not appear to matter directly for children’s decision making. Rather, one of the most important factors associated with children’s competitiveness is parents’ ambitions for their child’s later success in professional life. That is, children of parents stressing the importance of their offspring’s job success are significantly more likely to compete than children of less ambitious parents: we find a marginal increase (decrease) of about 14 percent in the likelihood to compete for a one point increase (decrease) from the mean choice on a seven-point ambitions scale. Interestingly, when controlling for the individual likelihood of winning a competition, children of highly ambitious parents decide to enter competition even when the prospects of winning are unfavorable. Consequently, relatively slow children with 3 very ambitious parents enter competitions and, on average, earn fewer rewards than relatively slow children whose parents are less ambitious. Hence, parents’ ambitions are correlated with children ‘overinvesting’ into competition. On average, we find parents with lower income and lower education to be more ambitious than families with high relative income. This effect could strengthen the already existing status and income disadvantages of children from low income and low education households. The remainder of the article is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the method we use to obtain data on children’s willingness to compete as well as parents’ characteristics and ambitions. Here we also formulate the hypotheses we want to test. In Section 3 we lay out the results of our study with regard to the different possible sources of competitiveness and test our hypotheses. Finally, Section 4 provides a concluding discussion of our results. 2 Method In total, our study includes data from 84 children of ages between almost three and six years.2 The settings of our study are two kindergartens in Northern Germany. The first kindergarten is located in Hamburg, in the suburb of Heimfeld. This data was collected in March 2012. The second kindergarten is located in Lower Saxony, in Essenrode. Here, we were able to collect the data in May 2012. Notice that both kindergartens are located in German middle class neighborhoods. Further characteristics on the kindergartens are reported in Table 1. Table 1 here The primary aim of our study is to analyze jointly the effects of a child’s characteristics and her parents’ characteristics and ambitions for her decision concerning competition. First, we describe the elicitation of the competition decision. Then we report the data on parents’ and children’s characteristics. 2.1 Eliciting Children’s Willingness to Compete We elicit children’s willingness to compete by offering competitive and non-competitive reward schemes in a running task. We borrow the idea of a running task from Gneezy and Rustichini 2Overall, 100 children participated in the experiment. However, we had to exclude 13 observations due to some missing data in the parents’ survey. Children were free to choose not to participate in the study at any point in time. This option was used by three very young children. 4 (2004), who use it to study competition effects among 9-10 years old children in Israel.3We employ the specific running task in our design to allow for easy comparison of our data with earlier findings. Moreover, running is one of the few tasks that presumably all children are familiar with already at a very young age. It therefore seems natural to consider competition in a running task for kindergarten children. The running task was conducted in the respective playgrounds of the two kindergartens in six separate sessions.4The kindergarten teachers allocated children into these sessions according to organizational criteria of the kindergartens. In each session, one group of children participated in our study, while all others were looked after by teachers. On average a group consisted of 16 children, while group sizes varied between 12 and 23 children. Both kindergartens offered activities for those children without parents’ consent or those who opted out during the sessions.5 The children were asked to run as fast as possible from one pair of cones to another pair of cones which were placed at a distance of 30 meters. Each child ran twice (without any other child running at the same time) and we recorded the time with a stop watch. Prior to the first recording, each child was informed that she would receive the reward if she completed the task faster than half of the other children. If she was not faster than half of the other children, then she received no reward for this recording. Notice that we did not elicit the child’s subjective expectation concerning the rank or being in the faster half of the group. Sutter and R¨ utzler (2014) report an overwhelming degree of overconfidence among children of that age, so that statement seems to provide little information (they report that on average 91 percent of the children expect to be in the faster group). Nonetheless, we assume that children could assess intuitively their performance within the group based on every-day experience, since they were able to observe each other while running. Information on performance and on earned rewards was not disclosed until the end of the experiment.6 After the first recording each child was interviewed in private (a teacher was always present in the background to ensure comfort for the child). We informed each child that there would be 3Recent studies by C´ ardenas et al. (2012), Dreber et al. (2011) and Sutter and R¨ utzler (2014) also make use of the task for research with 9-12 years old children in Colombia and Sweden, 7-10 years old children in Sweden, and 3-8 years old children in Austria, respectively. 4All sessions were conducted in comparable, sunny weather conditions. 5The data collection procedure and the internal handling of the data follows the procedures described in the Respect Code published by the European Commissions Information Society Technologies Program for socioeconomics experiments (http://www.respectproject.org/code/). Of course, this includes that despite the consent of her parents, a child was free to choose not to participate in the study at any point in time (see footnote 2). 6All children finally received at least one reward as a ‘show-up fee’. 5 a second recording and that this time the reward depended on her decision. Again, we told each child that we would record the time. Each child had to decide whether to run against the time of another child (i.e., to compete against another child), or to run in order to improve her own time. If she wins against another child, she receives a large reward plus a small reward. If she loses against another child, she receives no reward. Conversely, if she decides to improve her own time, she receives a large reward if she runs faster than before and a small reward if she does not improve her own time. The two options were illustrated by two large cards showing large and small wrapped rewards for the corresponding case (see Figure 5.3 in Appendix 5.4); children had to point to one of the two options and to declare explicitly their choices in order to make clear decisions. The interview with each child was conducted by the same experimenter and followed, as closely as possible, a protocol of how to phrase the instructions and questions.7The second recording of the running time was also conducted without another child running at the same time (see Figure 5.4 in Appendix 5.4).8The matching of competing children was set up by ranking first recording times and ensuring close ranks; no information concerning the matching was provided to the children.9Again, this procedure follows closely Gneezy and Rustichini (2004) as well as Sutter and R¨ utzler (2014). We employ the rewards in order to ensure an adequate incentive structure. While all children are informed about this incentive structure, we deliberately focus the attention of the children on the decision of whether to run against another child or to run to improve one’s own time. Thus, when confronted with the choice situation not only considerations of expected rewards, but also spontaneous inclinations to avoid or enter competition are likely to be present. In the latter case, we are not measuring risk preferences and beliefs about own and others’ performance, but rather the direct choice to opt for a competition per se. In either case, it is important to understand which factors shape the decision. Let us now turn to the characteristics and ambitions of the parents. 7See Appendix 5.2 for the protocol. 8We decided to have children run without their competitors aside them in order to disentangle the two effects of pressure from having another child next to oneself and being in a competition per se. Otherwise, we would have had the children running next to each other for the first recording as well, which may result in issues of feeling in a competition without being in one. 9We did not provide specific description regarding the matching procedure to children as this created a competitive edge for older ones: as they understand the matching procedure more easily, this could cause a systematic age bias. 6 2.2 Parents’ Preferences and Ambitions In addition to children’s decisions for or against entering into a competition, we collected data on parents’ preferences and ambitions which may allow us to identify parents’ influences on a child’s willingness to compete. In order to collect our data, we approached the parents by mail (sent via the kindergarten) to ask for their consent (with the permissions of the kindergartens’ directions and their administrative institutions). We combined the consent form with a survey part, so that we had the possibility to collect data on children’s and parents’ characteristics beyond the age and gender of the child. Note that neither parents nor kindergarten teachers were aware of our research question. To rule out obvious clues about our research question, the survey was a mixture of related and unrelated questions. The main reason for us to study kindergarten children is that they are at the very beginning of their encounter of social norms. Therefore, we expect that parents’ influence is fairly undiluted compared to later stages in life. Amongst others, we collected data on parents’ age, number and ages of siblings, duration of breast feeding, marital status of the parents, the language that is spoken at home, and the education of the parents. Further, we asked parents to answer questions with regard to trust, competition, risk, importance of athletic and professional success of their child, perceived relative household income and the mother’s share of household work on a seven-point scale.10 The survey items are guided by a list of hypotheses derived from multiple strands of the literature: Approaches suggesting the transmission of cultural traits argue that children adopt preferences similar to their parents’ (e.g., Bisin and Verdier, 2001, or see Bisin and Verdier, 2010, for a survey). In that light, competitive parents are expected to have competitive children.11 In our data set we measure to which extent parents like competition on a seven-point scale. The corresponding hypothesis is that highly competitive parents tend to have competitive children. If this hypothesis is confirmed, then it is still an open question which mechanism causes the correlation. One the one hand, parents share genes with their children. Cesarini et al. (2009a, 2009b) provide evidence from twin-studies that overconfidence, risk-taking and unconditional giving in dictator games are partly influenced by genetic similarity. On the other hand, they also show that the social environment matters. Parents serve as role models in their 10See Appendix C for an English translation of the survey sheet. 11Similar correlations between children’s and parents’ preferences are found recently for risk preferences and trust (Dohmen et al., 2012), for time preferences such as impatience (Kosse and Pfeiffer, 2012), and for attitudes concerning female labor force participation (Fernandez et al., 2004). 7 children’s socialization so that the characteristic may be very different for different family histories. To approach this question empirically, we asked parents to state their agreement with the statement that “success is based on hard work” in the questionnaire. Moreover, the analysis of Alm˚ as et al. (2015) shows that the economic underpinning of the preference formation process is the socio-economic standing of the parents. Therefore, we will relate the parents’ values that turn out to be crucial for a child’s formation of competition preferences to socio-economic background variables such as parent’s age, marital status, education, relative income, and division of homework among parents. The next type of hypothesis relates children’s competitiveness to their parents’ educational goals. It seems problematic to ask someone directly for her desire to have competitive children because competitiveness is not a typical dimension of educational goals. Moreover, we would reveal too much about the purpose of this study if we ask this question directly. Therefore, we ask the following questions: “As how important do you regard your child’s future professional success?” In a market economy, job success seems strongly related to competitive behavior. Moreover, we include a highly similar variable where professional success is replaced by athletic success to control for level effects in the sense that the interpretation of ‘very important’ might be quite different across respondents. Thus, we can use the difference of the answers to job success and sports success to construct a relative measure of job success (see footnote 14). Another related aspect for children’s competitiveness may be social preferences. Balafoutas et al. (2012) show the relationship between distributional preferences and competitive behavior for adults: when choosing between a tournament and a piece rate, efficiency seeking subjects prefer the former more often than spiteful and inequality averse subjects. In our study, we try to test parents’ educational goals with regards to social preferences on children’s competitiveness by asking the following questions: “As how important do you regard it that your child is careful with weaker children?” On the level of the child we consider these characteristics: gender, age, and number of siblings. One reason to include age is the amount of experience with competition while the psychological work by Van Lange et al. (1997) suggests that the number of siblings might matter. Of course, age is also a control for several other aspects of a child’s development. Similarly, for the number of siblings there might be mechanisms beyond experience with competition which shape the socialization process. For example, it could be the case that a singleton is raised differently by the parents than a child with (many) siblings, since, for instance, parents have more attention for their only child. Empirical evidence on the impact of age on competitiveness is 8 their parents’ ambitions (compare the insignificant coefficient of ‘job success ×fast’). For girls, we find qualitatively similar, but insignificant results combined with a strong influence of the number of siblings for their decisions. Thus it seems that boys are more susceptible for parents’ ambitions than girls. Whether this gender effect results from different responses to parents’ ambitions, or from different parents’ ambitions towards boys and girls17 we will discuss below.18 To summarize, our analysis of children’s choices for or against competition yields Result 2: Parents’ preferences with respect to competition, risk, or hard work do not correlate significantly with the child’s choice. However, there is a significant positive association of parents’ ambitions on the children’s (particularly boys’) willingness to compete when children are relatively slow. In the next subsection, we will address the potential origins and consequences of this finding. 3.3 Parents’ Ambitions and their Characteristics In this paragraph, we want to address two things: first, can we identify social characteristics of parents that are associated with their ambitions concerning children’s job success? Second, what are the consequences of parents’ ambitions for children’s winning chances? For the first question, we will make use of parents’ background variables which we collected in the questionnaire. Specifically, we estimate a linear regression model (vi)with ‘job success’ as dependent variable, which, as we recall, measures the parents’ ambitions concerning the professional success of their child on a seven-point scale. As independent variables we use income relative to other families (which is a subjective report on a seven-point scale), ‘parents’ age’ (of the parent who filled out the questionnaire), a dummy variable ‘married’ (which is one if parents are married and zero otherwise), the ‘number of children’, a dummy variable ‘college’ (which is one if one of the parents has a college degree and zero otherwise), as well as ‘housework mother’ (measuring the percentage of housework handled by the mother). We relate these variables on the right hand side characterizing parents’ personal background (‘income’, ‘parents’ age’, ‘college’) and their family organization (‘married’, ‘housework mother’) and their 17Ambitions for girls and boys do not differ significantly (averages are 6 and 5.37, respectively, p= 0.10 using a Wilcoxon Mann-Whitney Rank Sum Test, two-sided). 18Notice that we also analyzed model (v) for different age groups separately (not reported here), but could not find any significant gender difference between sub-samples. 15 ambitions regarding the job of their offspring.19 It is important to stress that this by no means identifies causal directions: ‘job success’, ‘collage’, ‘income’, ‘age’, and the other variables are to some degree endogenous. Rather, the model shows correlations between ambitions and socio-demographic background variables, which need to be interpreted cautiously. Table 6 reports marginal effects for model (vi)along robust standard errors, clustered by groups, in parentheses. Table 6 here The estimated marginal effects for parents’ social characteristics indicates a significant negative relation of ‘income’ and ‘number of children’ on the parents’ ambitions and a positive effect of being married, while there is no significant marginal effect for ‘parents’ age’, education and ‘housework mother’.20 Thus it seems that parents of singletons hold at the same time stronger ambitions concerning the job success of their children than parents having more than one child. Similarly, children whose parents are married face stronger parental ambitions. Interestingly, the results of model (vi)show another important relation between ambitions of parents and another characteristic, namely their perceived income relative to other families. That is, parents perceiving that they earn higher incomes than other families are associated with less ambitions with respect to their offspring. As such, our results fit the classic psychological study by McKee and Leader (1955) who find evidence that lower class children at the age of 3-4 compete more than higher class children.21 One potential mechanism for this could be the getting-ahead orientation or in words of the authors, competitiveness of lower class children might be “a compensatory device” (McKee and Leader, 1955, p. 141). Thus, one way to interpret the finding is that higher relative income is correlated with lower ambitions: parents with higher education are at the same time more confident regarding the success of their children, and, therefore, do not stress the importance of their success as much. However, an alternative explanation could be that well educated parents have a higher relative income. At the same time, knowing how difficult it is to reap success on the job, they are less ambitious regarding their offspring’s job success. 19In this regression, as well as in all estimations, there is no significant effect of which parent, that is, mother or father, has answered the questionnaire. Most of the respondents were mothers. 20In an additional model (not reported here), we included also ‘male’ and an interaction term ‘male×housework mother’ to see whether role perception affects parents’ ambitions concerning boys and girls differently. However, estimated marginal effects are insignificant. 21Our as well as results by McKee and Leader (1955) contradict the findings of Alm˚ as et al. (2015) on Norwegian adolescents. We provide an interpretation of this result in our Discussion. 16 The final question that we examine is whether children forgo rewards in our study due to their parents’ strong ambitions. That is, how is the children’s likelihood to win competition correlated with parents’ ambitions? Certainly, ’job success’ is a crude predictor for children’s performance in the second running task.22 In other words, relating the decision to compete to parents’ ambitions, but not to (relative) performance leads to questionable decisions. Consequently strong ambitions might result in unwise inclinations in favor of competition. To investigate this question we assess the quality of decisions from two angles, ex ante and ex post. For the ex ante assessment, slow children make poor decisions by choosing competition. Restricting our attention to these slow children, we assess how many of them made the suboptimal decision to enter competition depending on parents’ ambitions in Figure 2. Among the children who are slower than the median child in their group, the fraction of those who still enter competition is increasing in parents’ ambitions – from one out of four to three out of four. The results indicate that higher ambitions of parents is associated with a child entering competition although this choice is suboptimal. Thus, children of highly ambitious parents decide poorly from an ex ante perspective. Figure 2 here Ex post, we know who entered competition and how they performed in competition, which makes it easier to assess the quality of decisions. Recall that children winning in competition received both rewards, while their opponents do not receive any reward. Hence, entering competition is always optimal ex post when a competition is won and never optimal ex post when a competition is lost. Table 7 presents the fraction of actual winners in competition separated again by parents’ ambitions. It must be noted, however, that the actual outcome depends on the applied matching procedure, and, as such, also on luck. To more robustly assess the quality of decisions ex post, we additionally compare a child’s running time in competition with the running time of an average child in the set of children who entered competition within their group. Table 7 thus also reports the fraction of children who would have won in competition (i.e., being strictly faster) when meeting a median competitor of their group. Table 7 here 22A linear regression with ‘job success’ as the only independent and time 2 as the dependent variable has an r-square of 0.03 (robust standard errors, clustered at the group level). For comparison, including ‘time 1’ as the only independent variable in this regression leads to an r-square of 0.80 (again, robust standard errors, clustered at the group level). 17 Among the children whose parents stated ambitions of 5 or less 63% (5 out of 8) won in competition, among the children whose parents stated 6 only 41% (7 out of 17) won in competition and among the children whose parents stated 7 as few as 38% (5 out of 13) won in competition.23 The hypothetical median matching confirms the qualitative observation of the actual matching. Although the numbers of observations for these subgroups are small, there is a clear indication that most of the children of parents with strong ambitions would have been better off, if they had not entered competition. In fact, if they had opted against competition then 63% of them would have earned the large reward and 36% would have earned the small reward, both of which is better than no reward. Summarizing our findings in this subsection, we obtain Result 3: High ambitions regarding children’s job success are associated with lower incomes. In turn, most children of parents with strong ambitions would have been better off, if they had not entered competition as they would have increased their average number of presents. 4 Conclusion We started our article with some reflections on the positive and negative effects of competition. Being competitive offers the chance for substantial success, particularly in modern societies. However, competitions has also important down-sides (e.g., Dohmen et al., 2011): resources are potentially wasted, and the prospect of winning may change dramatically depending on the task and the opponent. Therefore, it is not wise to compete in every contest. This article provides evidence for an association between parents’ ambitions and children’s (misguided) decisions for competition. More specifically, even slow children opt for competition in our running task if parents are highly ambitious concerning the professional success of their offspring. The decisions of slow children of ambitious parents have a two-folded effect. On the one hand, fast children – who are “correctly” attracted by competition – are more likely to win as they may meet one of the slowly, but nonetheless competing children. On the other hand, excessive ambitions by their parents coincide with a substantial reduction for those slow children to receive any reward, although there was an alternative option with a guaranteed small reward and a likely large reward. Estimation results suggest that boys are more prone to the ambition effect than girls. This 23Since some groups have an odd number of participants, the number of winners and losers in competition need not exactly coincide. 18 could reflect the fact that among the children, there was a substantial number of boys and girls with a third and forth generation migration background from Southern Europe and the Middle East. Parents associated with this cultural background may stress the job success of their male offspring, whereas this issue may be of less importance for girls. It could be the case that this point is reflected in the asymmetry by which parents’ ambitions influence the decision of boys and girls to compete. However, due to the limited number of observations, this point needs to be explored in future research. Further, we find a strong correlation between the socio-economic background and parents’ ambitions. Parents of singletons hold stronger ambitions concerning the job success of their children, so that the ‘number of children’ in a family is negatively related to those ambitions. On the other hand, the data indicate strong ambitions for parents with lower perceived income along married couples. This result suggests a mechanism following the classic psychological finding (e.g., McKee and Leader, 1955) that children with lower socio-economic status are more competitive. That is, parents of lower socio-economic status put particular stress on the job success of their offspring. One potential reason could be that parents with a limited experience on how to climb the social ladder may wish the best for their children because they do not apprehend correctly the difficulties ahead. In turn, their children are very competitive.24 At the first glance, our findings contradict previous results on Norwegian adolescents in the age of 14 to 15 years suggesting that children from high income and high education households compete significantly more often than children from low income and low education households (Alm˚ as et al., 2015). These latter results might be the consequence of patterns similar to the ones that we found: too much competitive spirit of young children with a low socio-economic background may lead to a waste of effort in the wrong competitions, potentially connecting competition with motions of stress, depression and anxiety (Gilbert et al., 2009). Hence, the long term effect of too much competition in early years could be the avoidance of competition later on, laying the foundations for less success in their future life. On the other hand, the competitiveness of slow children with a lower socio-economic background increases the winning chances for young children with a higher socio-economic background, who compete predominantly in their favorable tasks. Therefore, extreme ambitions on the parents’ side do not reduce but rather strengthen the existing status and income structure within societies. 24Our results indicate correlations, but no causal effects. Therefore, we cannot rule out heritability of preferences (Cesarini et al. 2009a, 2009b) and the claim that children’s high level of competitiveness increases parents’ ambitious concerning the job success of their offspring. Further research is needed to establish (or refute) this claim. 19 Overall, our results indicate suggestions for a more balanced education policy. Although we live in a meritocracy stressing the importance of competitiveness for the personal success in most modern societies, our results show the drawbacks of excessive competitiveness for children. Even economists acknowledge the downsides of excessive competitiveness (e.g., Belfield and Levin, 2002; Ladd and Fiske, 2003). For that reason, it is important to give youngsters room to develop a sound understanding when competition is beneficial, and when it is not. One way for parents and teachers to support them may be to keep merit principles away from their youngsters. Restricting the competitive pressure very early on in life (e.g., by lowering the number of performance differentiations in primary schools or kindergartens) avoids children’s experience of exaggerated competition. This may help children in rather early years to develop the ability to choose competitions wisely and to be equipped with the specific gear that allows them to participate successfully in daily competition later on. Of course, further research is needed to develop a thorough understanding of this topic. For instance, in our paper we work with parents’ risk attitude as a substitute for children’s risk attitude. But this is indeed a first approximation, and it would be interesting to explore in greater detail the interaction between children’s competitiveness, their own risk attitude, parents’ risk attitude, and parents’ ambitions. Therefore, we consider this study as a promising invitation for future research to shed more light on this exciting aspect of human life. References and Notes [1] Alm˚ as, I., Cappelen, A., Salvanes, K., Sørensen, E. & Tungodden, B. (2015). Willingness to compete: family matters, Management Science 62, 2149-2162. 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Development of prosocial, individualistic, and competitive orientations: theory and preliminary evidence, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology73, 733. 23 Figure and Tables Kindergarten Heimfeld Essenrode total children 52 32 girls 29 12 boys 23 20 number of siblings 0.78 0.97 parents’ age (median) 34 37 married parents 83% 88% mother university education 27% 23% father university education 42% 31% Table 1: Number of participants and family structure. variables mean std. dev. min. median max. child’s char. age 4.30 0.94 2.90 4.05 6.52 male 51% number of siblings 0.89 0.70 0 1 2 parents’ pref. like competition 4.84 1.45 1 5 7 risk 3.98 1.55 1 4 7 hard work 5.60 1.03 3 6 7 parents’ ambitions job success 5.66 1.27 1 6 7 sports success 4.45 1.41 1 4 7 careful with weaker 6.50 0.69 4 6.5 7 Table 2: Most important control variables – children’s and parents’ characteristics. 24 Questions concerning your child Question Your Assessment (please mark with a cross) My child is rather shy outgoing O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O As how important do you regard your child’s future athletic success? completely irrelevant very important O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O As how important do you regard your child’s future professional success? completely irrelevant very important O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O As how important do you regard it that your child is careful with weaker children? completely irrelevant very important O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O How much does your child like to go to the kindergarten? very little very much O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O General questions Question Your Assessment (please mark with a cross) How would you assess your household income relative to incomes of other families? very low average very high O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O What share of time for household care does the mother of the child handle? 0 % 100% O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O As how important do you regard feedback about the general behavior of children in this study? completely irrelevant very important O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O As how important do you regard feedback about your child’s behavior in this study?? completely irrelevant very important O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O-------O Thank you for your help and for making this study of the University of Hamburg possible. Figure 5.2: The survey sheet (English translation); side two 31 5.4 Appendix: Illustrations Figure 5.3: Illustration of reward scheme 32 Figure 5.4: Children during the task 33