Maximilian W. Mueller, Joan Hamory Hicks, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Edward Miguel, “The Illusion of Stable Preferences Over Major Life Decisions.” NBER Working Paper 25844, May 2019; available at
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25844.
• Uh, "major life decisions" such as the number of children to have.
• High-stakes decisions tend to be ones that we have little experience with: they are not like choosing a breakfast cereal. Also, they have major implications down the road, so it is helpful to have a good feeling of what our future preferences will be like. But perhaps people suffer from projection bias, they overestimate the extent to which their future preferences will resemble their current preferences.
• The inquiry looks into the stability over time with respect to women's preferences over the desirable number of children to have. Do women hold accurate forecasts of their own future preferences with respect to children? Do women recall accurately their previous preferences?
• The data are drawn from young Kenyan women, followed over a nine-year span.
• Most respondents, over the course of the nine years, change their desired number of children – and 20% change it by two or more children.
• Almost half of the respondents who do not expect to have a child in the next five years do have a child in that time. Mothers and married women who report that they do not expect to have a child in the next five years do not meet their expectations most of the time.
• Most women cannot correctly recall their desired fertility from three years ago. Indeed, for those whose desired fertility changes, less than 10 percent recall their old preferences correctly. Married women and mothers who have increased their desired fertility are particularly unlikely to recall accurately their old preferences – rather, they think that their current preferences are the same as what they used to be.
• Average fertility desires are pretty stable over time – but at the individual level, there is lots of movement. This movement is neither foreseen nor, after the fact, recognized: there is both projection bias and retrospection bias.
• Uh, "major life decisions" such as the number of children to have.
• High-stakes decisions tend to be ones that we have little experience with: they are not like choosing a breakfast cereal. Also, they have major implications down the road, so it is helpful to have a good feeling of what our future preferences will be like. But perhaps people suffer from projection bias, they overestimate the extent to which their future preferences will resemble their current preferences.
• The inquiry looks into the stability over time with respect to women's preferences over the desirable number of children to have. Do women hold accurate forecasts of their own future preferences with respect to children? Do women recall accurately their previous preferences?
• The data are drawn from young Kenyan women, followed over a nine-year span.
• Most respondents, over the course of the nine years, change their desired number of children – and 20% change it by two or more children.
• Almost half of the respondents who do not expect to have a child in the next five years do have a child in that time. Mothers and married women who report that they do not expect to have a child in the next five years do not meet their expectations most of the time.
• Most women cannot correctly recall their desired fertility from three years ago. Indeed, for those whose desired fertility changes, less than 10 percent recall their old preferences correctly. Married women and mothers who have increased their desired fertility are particularly unlikely to recall accurately their old preferences – rather, they think that their current preferences are the same as what they used to be.
• Average fertility desires are pretty stable over time – but at the individual level, there is lots of movement. This movement is neither foreseen nor, after the fact, recognized: there is both projection bias and retrospection bias.
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