Agata Gasiorowska

Money Cues Increase Agency and Decrease Prosociality Among Children: Early Signs of Market-Mode Behaviors

People can get most of their needs broadly satisfied in two ways: by close communal ties and by dealings with people in the marketplace. These modes of relating—termed communal and market—often necessitate qualitatively different motives, behaviors, and mind-sets. We reasoned that activating market mode would produce behaviors consistent with it and impair behaviors consistent with communal mode. In a series of experiments, money—the market-mode cue—was presented to Polish children ages 3 to 6. We measured communal behavior by prosocial helpfulness and generosity and measured market behavior by performance and effort. Results showed that handling money (compared with other objects) increased laborious effort and reduced helpfulness and generosity. The effects of money primes were not due to the children’s mood, liking for money, or task engagement. This work is the first to demonstrate that young children tacitly understand market mode and also understand that money is a cue to shift into it.

Saving can save from death anxiety: mortality salience and financial decision-making.

Four studies tested the idea that saving money can buffer death anxiety and constitute a more effective buffer than spending money. Saving can relieve future-related anxiety and provide people with a sense of control over their fate, thereby rendering death thoughts less threatening. Study 1 found that participants primed with both saving and spending reported lower death fear than controls. Saving primes, however, were associated with significantly lower death fear than spending primes. Study 2 demonstrated that mortality primes increase the attractiveness of more frugal behaviors in save-or-spend dilemmas. Studies 3 and 4 found, in two different cultures (Polish and American), that the activation of death thoughts prompts people to allocate money to saving as opposed to spending. Overall, these studies provided evidence that saving protects from existential anxiety, and probably more so than spending.

Lay Evaluation of Financial Experts: The Action Advice Effect and Confirmation Bias

The goal of this experimental project was to investigate lay peoples’ perceptions of epistemic authority (EA) in the field of finance. EA is defined as the extent to which a source of information is treated as evidence for judgments independently of its objective expertise and based on subjective beliefs. Previous research suggested that EA evaluations are biased and that lay people tend to ascribe higher EA to experts who advise action (in the case of medical experts) or confirm clients’ expectations (in the case of politicians). However, there has been no research into biases in lay evaluations of financial experts and this project is aimed to fill this gap. Experiment 1 showed that lay people tended to ascribe greater authority to financial consultants who gave more active advice to clients considering taking out a mortgage. Experiment 2 confirmed the action advice effect found in Experiment 1. However, the outcomes of Experiments 2 and – particularly – 3 suggested that this bias might also be due to clients’ desire to confirm their own opinions. Experiment 2 showed that the action advice effect was moderated by clients’ own opinions on taking loans. Lay people ascribed the greatest EA to the advisor in the scenario in which he advised taking action and where this coincided with the client’s positive opinion on the advisability of taking out a loan. In Experiment 3 only participants with a positive opinion on the financial product ascribed greater authority to experts who recommended it; participants whose opinion was negative tended to rate consultants who advised rejecting the product more highly. To conclude, these three experiments revealed that lay people ascribe higher EA to financial consultants who advise action rather than maintenance of the status quo, but this effect is limited by confirmation bias: when the client’s a priori opinion is salient, greater authority is ascribed to experts whose advice confirms it. In this sense, results presented in the present paper suggest that the action advice effect might be also interpreted as a specific manifestation of confirmation bias.

Tell Me What I Wanted to Hear: Confirmation Effect in Lay Evaluations of Financial Expert Authority: LAY EVALUATION OF FINANCIAL EXPERTS

In real life, people engage in interactive decision processes by consulting with experts. However, before taking advice, they must recognise the authority of an expert to assess the quality of the advice. The main goal of this research was to investigate how the confirmation effect affects lay evaluations of the epistemic authority of financial experts. Experiment 1 showed that lay people tend to ascribe greater epistemic authority to those experts whose advice confirms people s opinions, both measured and manipulated. Experiment 2 revealed that when participants own opinions are not salient, people tend to evaluate experts authority as higher when their advice confirms social norms. In Experiment 3 we jointly investigated the effects of participants own opinions and social norms on the evaluations of authority. When both sources of expertise were made salient, decision-makers favoured advice confirming their own beliefs and used it to evaluate experts authority. Three interpretations of the role confirmation plays in the experts authority evaluations are proposed: (1) self-defensive strategies; (2) processing fluency; and (3) psychological consequences of na€ıve realism. The paper discusses practical implications of the results. We propose that increasing consumers knowledge about biases might protect their evaluations of financial advice from being susceptible to the confirmation effect.