Cognitive Reflection and Authoritarianism Relate to How Parents Respond to Children's Science Questions

When children ask questions about science, parents use a variety of strategies to answer them, including providing accurate information, connecting to prior knowledge, or simply saying "I do not know." This study examines the factors underlying individual differences in parental explanatory characteristics. Parents (N = 148; Mage = 38; 84% female, 16% male; 58% with White American children; 67% having completed college; 49% with household income over $75,000) of children ages 7 to 10 answered eight questions about biology as if they were responding to their child. They also completed three measures of different aspects of reasoning and values: the Picture Vocabulary Test (PVT) to measure verbal intelligence (Gershon et al., 2013), the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Toplak et al., 2014), which measures the tendency to override intuitive but incorrect responses to engage in reflective thinking, and the Authoritarianism Scale (Feldman & Stenner, 1997), which measures a parent's preference for encouraging obedience toward authority figures over encouraging their child's autonomy. Our findings support that different factors are associated with different explanatory characteristics. Parents high in reflective thinking tend to provide more connections to other knowledge in their explanations, while parents high in authoritarianism tend to provide fewer references to uncertainty and how to manage it. Implications for effective parent-child communication and children's scientific understanding will be discussed.