PHILADELPHIA, July 25 (UPI) -- Mothers are role models for teenage girls, but U.S. researchers say the teens have a strong influence on the makeup and clothing their moms buy.
Lead author Ayalla A. Ruvio of the Temple University Fox School of Business says mothers have a much stronger tendency to mimic their daughters' consumption behavior than vice versa.
"This finding provides initial support for the notion of reverse socialization and suggests that the impact adolescents have on their parents is much more profound than has been credited to them," Ruvio says in a statement.
"It is not merely the mimicking act that is conscious, the findings clearly indicate that the subjects intentionally choose the figure they want to emulate and report their inclination to mimic their consumption behavior."
This phenomenon -- an intentional decision-making process of whom to mimic and how -- produced a new term and inspired the article's title: "The Consumer Doppelganger Effect."
The researchers sampled 343 mother-daughter pairs, with an average age of 44 for the mothers and 16 for the daughters.
The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Behavior, found that if a mother is young at heart, has high fashion consciousness and views her daughter as a style expert, she will tend to doppelgang her daughter's consumption behavior.
