Priming Parental Identity: Evidence from Experimental Data

Identity is a person’s sense of self, rooted in affiliations with social groups. It carries behavioral prescriptions and shapes decision-making. Only salient identities weigh in the decision-making at a given moment partially due to people’s inattention to all their identities. Priming one identity over others can shift perceived payoffs to decisions and affect decision-making. This paper aims to understand how priming parental identity affects parents’ decision-making among low-income parents with young children. In two different experiments, we prompt parents via text message to redeem the unredeemed gift card they owned for participating in past research studies. Results from these two experiments show: (1) a prompt highlighting what parents could purchase for their children with the gift card significantly increased the redemption rate by 45% compared to a generic reminder to redeem the gift card; (2) a prompt highlighting what parents could purchase for their children significantly increased the redemption rate by 39% compared to a message encouraging parents to think about what they could buy for themselves. Neither study has heterogeneity in treatment impact, aligning with the fact that parents value parental identity in all backgrounds. We interpret these treatment effects as the result of priming the parental identity and altering parental decision-making. Our findings underscore the importance of highly valued and salient identities in shaping decision-making.