human behavior

Sin stocks

Sin stocks are stocks issued by companies that engage in socially or morally objectionable activities, which in the narrowest sense are companies involved in the production of alcohol, tobacco, or gambling. We investigate the attitudes people have towards them.

Publications

• Niszczota, P., & Błaszczyński, J. (2024). Hard to digest investments: People oppose investment in both conventional and cultured meat producers. Ecological Economics, 218, 108094. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.108094
  Summary: The production of cultured meat is becoming more feasible, and so in this paper, we investigated how people perceive cultivated meat producers (relative to conventional meat producers, and non-meat stocks). The findings from two experimental studies show that people exhibit a bias towards investment in meat producers: people with either a high attitude towards animal welfare or low meat attachment are less willing to invest in meat stocks. We also show that disgust towards eating meat can limit interest in producers of cultivated meat.

• Niszczota, P., Białek, M., & Conway, P. (2022). Deontological and Utilitarian Responses to Sacrificial Dilemmas Predict Disapproval of Sin Stocks. Social Psychology, 53(2), 51–62. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000474
  Summary: In two studies, we show that people scoring higher on deontological and utilitarian response tendencies disapproved of sin, but not conventional, stocks (defined in two different ways). Our findings clarify the psychology involved in morally questionable investment decisions.

• Niszczota, P., & Białek, M. (2021). The effect of gender and parenting daughters on judgments of morally controversial companies. PLOS ONE, 16(12), e0260503. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260503
  Summary: We investigate whether parenting daughters makes people (especially men) judge morally controversial companies more harshly. We look at both the propensity to invest and the propensity to work in such companies. Propensity to invest increases consistent with a "daughter effect", but there is no such effect for employment prospects.

• Niszczota, P., & Białek, M. (2021). Women oppose sin stocks more than men do. Finance Research Letters, 41, 101803. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2020.101803
  Summary: We show that women judge sin stocks more harshly than men do, which has several repercussions. 

• Niszczota, P., & Kaszás, D. (2020). Robo-investment aversion. PLOS ONE, 15(9), e0239277. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239277

Summary: In five experiments (N = 3,828), we investigate whether people prefer investment decisions to be made by human investment managers rather than by algorithms (“robos”). In all of the studies, we investigate morally controversial companies, as it is plausible that a preference for humans as investment managers becomes exacerbated in areas where machines are less competent, such as morality. Overall, our findings show a considerable mean effect size for robo-investment aversion (d = –0.39 [–0.45, –0.32]).

Daughter effects in judgment and decision making

Studies from sociology and social psychology show that men can adopt some of the preferences of their daughters. We look at how parenting daughters affects economic behavior.

Publications

• Kajackaite, A., Niszczota, P. (2023). Lying (non-)parents: Being a parent does not reduce dishonesty. Applied Economics Letters. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504851.2023.2212954

Summary: In this paper we complement earlier research by looking whether parenting children decreases lying behavior. Over 2,000 participants performed a private die-rolling task. Similarly to the Dictator Game, our findings suggest no daughter (or son) effect.

• Leder, J., & Niszczota, P. (2022). Parenting daughters does not increase monetary prosocial behavior: Evidence from the Dictator game. Social Psychology, 53(6), 383–389. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000508
  Summary: Research from financial economics suggest that parenting daughters makes men more prosocial. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to test whether such an effect is reflected in Dictator Game behavior. It isn't.

• Niszczota, P., & Białek, M. (2021). The effect of gender and parenting daughters on judgments of morally controversial companies. PLOS ONE, 16(12), e0260503. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260503
  Summary: see summary in "Sin stocks".

Foreign language effect

Much research now suggests that people make different judgments in decisions if they use a foreign (second) language (L2). Findings suggest that people can become less biased in L2, yet there are many null findings or findings suggesting adverse effects of L2. This makes it all the more interesting to study this field, as we are still unsure about the mechanisms at play when using L2 in judgment and decision making.

Publications

• Niszczota, P., Pawlak, M., & Białek, M. (2022). Bilinguals are less susceptible to the bias blind spot in their second language. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13670069221110384. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069221110383
  Summary: People generally think that they are less susceptible to biases than other people, which is usually not true. We investigate whether this tendency - termed the bias blind spot - is reduced when people that are proficient in two languages (bilinguals) use their second language. Our results suggest that this is indeed the case, consistent with the existence of a "foreign language effect". However, the effect is limited to (well-known) psychological biases and not economic biases.

• Białek, M., Muda, R., Stewart, K., Niszczota, P., & Pieńkosz, D. (2020). Thinking in a foreign language distorts allocation of cognitive effort: Evidence from reasoning. Cognition, 205, 104420. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104420

• Muda, R., Niszczota, P., Białek, M., & Conway, P. (2018). Reading dilemmas in a foreign language reduces both deontological and utilitarian response tendencies. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(2), 321–326. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000447

Risk-taking and decisions made under conflicting information

In the past, we have also conducted studies dealing with risk-taking, and how people behave when they receive conflicting information from two sources.

Publications

• Muda, R., Niszczota, P., & Augustynowicz, P. (2020). The effect of imperfect memory recall on risk preferences. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 33(5), 683–690. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2185

• Muda, R., Niszczota, P., Augustynowicz, P., & Markiewicz, Ł. (2018). The dissolution of temporal distance increases risk-taking: Experimental evidence. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 16565. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-34780-2

• Niszczota, P., & Petrova, D. (2022), Treatment choice in the presence of conflicting information: The role of physician likeability in the choice of non-proven therapies against conventional treatment. British Journal of Health Psychology, 27(2), 501-515. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12559

This research was supported by grants 2018/31/D/HS4/01814 (SONATA) and 2018/02/X/HS4/01703 (MINIATURA)
from the National Science Centre, Poland (Narodowe Centrum Nauki).