Self-Serving Bias in the Implicit and Explicit Evaluation of Partners and Exes as Parents: A Pilot Study

The quality of partners’ relationship can be influenced by the reciprocal respect of the other’s parenting role, especially when the couple breaks up. This study is aimed at investigating the implicit vs. explicit self-serving biases in the evaluation of partners and exes as parents (or potential parents), exploring gender differences and possible relationships with dyadic cohesion. Two Implicit Association Tests and two semantic differentials, comparing each respondent with current partners and last significant exes, and also a scale measuring dyadic cohesion were administered to 108 participants (40 males), aged 28.08 (SD = 8.65). As expected, a series of one sample t tests showed that participants assessed better themselves than others on both IAT and self-report evaluations, with larger effects toward exes than toward partners and on implicit than explicit measures. A MANOVA on implicit and explicit measures showed that females devalued exes, but not partners, more than males. Dyadic cohesion scores were negatively correlated with the explicit evaluations of partners but not with implicit ones. Theoretical interpretations in terms of self-serving bias were discussed. In the literature on familiar relationships, many studies (e.g. Cohen & Weissman, 1984) showed that one of the most important factor in the assessment of parenting quality is the degree to which partners respect and appreciate the parental role of the other. In particular, the respect of other parent’s judgment and the desire to communicate with him/her are considered as two of the most important facets of parental alliance (Cohen & Weissman, 1984). Interestingly, different studies (e.g. Floyd, Gilliom, Costigan, 1998; Bearss & Eyberg, 2010) tested the effects of parenting alliance on parent-child interaction and children adjustment. In a first study, Floyd et al. (1998), using a structural equation modeling approach on longitudinal data, demonstrated that the levels of parenting alliance at time 1 predicted the negativity of child-mother interaction at time 2 (18-24 months later), also controlling for the child-mother interaction at time 1. In a second study, significant correlations were found between parenting alliance and children behavior problems also controlling for marital adjustment levels. These studies clarified how important can be the respect and the appreciation of partner’s parenting role for an adequate rearing of the children. In this line of reasoning, the main aim of the present study is to investigate how people evaluate themselves as parents (or potential parent) with respect to the partners, focusing in particular on possible tendencies to overestimate or underestimate their own capacity.