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.

本研究公开一项实验所得的个体决策数据集，可复用以探究心理贫困（psychological poverty）对重大经济决策的影响。本研究的创新样本包含两组受试对象：来自同一高校的正式注册贫困学生与普通学生。首先，受试对象被随机分配至启动组（需引导其思考自身经济状况）或对照组。随后，所有受试对象完成三项独立的经济决策任务：任务1与任务2均设置时限，用于测试受试对象在时间压力下的表现；任务3为一项投资决策任务，受试对象需在拓宽收入来源与压缩开支之间进行权衡取舍。本实验通过z-Tree软件开展，所有受试对象的决策数据及反应时均记录于z-Tree生成的Excel文件中。该数据集可复用于多学科研究，主题涵盖心理因素对各类重大社会与经济问题的影响，包括不平等、贫困、经济增长、反应时与决策精度间的权衡等。本研究采用的人工田野实验（artefactual field experiments）设计，可帮助研究者进一步厘清心理贫困与经济决策间的因果关系。相关研究成果将对心理学与经济学的整体理论体系，以及缓解贫困与不平等的创新公共政策等应用场景产生重要的基础性启示。