Family resemblance in political attitudes: Comparing and predicting overall and distinctive dyadic correlations

Family resemblance is not entirely due to specific mutual influence but is also rooted in belonging to the same cultural context. To estimate the relative contribution of these two components of similarity, the studies presented in this paper assessed, compared, and tried to predict both overall and distinctive dyadic correlations across different measures of political attitudes (RWA, SDO, conservatism, and political intolerance), in two convenience samples of Italian university students (Study 1, N = 248; Study 2, N = 351) and their parents. Results showed that parents and children were similar, but this resemblance was largely due to their belonging to the same culture. Consistently with group socialization theory (Harris, 1995), this suggests that parental influence is mostly exerted indirectly, by placing children in a given socio-cultural environment. While overall family resemblance was higher for the first sample than the second, distinctive resemblance was the same size for both, which is low but significant, equal for mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, and same- and cross-sex dyads. Parental distinctive similarity was higher than child-parent similarity in both studies and, likely because it favors children’s correct perception of parental orientation, explained a significant portion of variance in the latter (Study 2). Parental consistency also moderated the association between children’s identification with their fathers and child-father similarity. In line with the perception-adoption model of political socialization (Hatemi & Ojeda, 2021), this result suggests that both perceptual accuracy and motivation to embrace parental values are needed for political attitudes transmission.