The Impact of Psychological Poverty on Economic Decisions

We present individual decision data from an experimental study that can be reused for researching the impact of psychological poverty on important economics decisions. Our innovative sample consists of two pools of subjects: officially registered impoverished students and normal students from the same university. First, subjects were randomly assigned either to a priming group that induced them to think about their financial conditions or to a control group. Then all subjects performed three independent tasks of economic decisions. Both Task 1 and Task 2 have a time limit that intends to test subjects’ performance under time pressure. Task 3 is an investment project in which subjects are facing a trade-off between broadening the source of income and minimizing expenditure. The experiment is performed via the z-Tree program and all subjects’ decisions, as well as the response time, were recorded in an excel file generated by z-Tree. The data have the potential to be reused in multi-disciplinary studies related to the psychological influences on important social and economic problems including inequality, poverty, economic growth, the trade-off between response time and decision precision, etc. Our treatments of artefactual field experiments enable researchers to further identify the causal relationship between psychological poverty and economic decisions. Those research results would have fundamental implications for psychology and economics theory in general and applications such as innovative public policies for alleviating poverty and inequality.