Analogical Social Perspective Taking to Shift Parents’ Views on Adolescents’ Social Media Privacy: A Proof-of-Concept Intervention Study

Parental monitoring of adolescents' social media use creates tension between safety, autonomy, and trust. Teenagers often experience monitoring as an invasion of privacy, while parents may view it as responsible protection. Such misaligned perspectives could fuel parent-child conflict. We propose that parents may egocentrically underweight adolescents' privacy concerns, partly because their protective role makes safety-focused judgments feel appropriate. In a preregistered experiment ( N = 293 US parents), we tested whether a brief social perspective taking (SPT) exercise could shift parents' views. To mirror their teenagers' experience of parental monitoring, treatment parents imagined instances of their privacy being violated by someone with power over them. Control parents imagined comparably uncomfortable situations that lacked a privacy violation. Treatment parents reported greater perceived discomfort over teenagers' privacy violations and placed more value on teenagers' privacy than control parents. We found no differences in parents’ valuing of trust or their hypothetical monitoring behavior. Assuming these findings are not the result of some experimental artifact, they offer preliminary support for the effectiveness of analogical SPT, in which the perceiver is placed in an analogous situation with their usual power position reversed.