Differing conceptions of the causes of the economic crisis: Effects of culture, economic training, and personal impact

David Leiser, Rinat Benita and Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2016, vol. 53, issue C, 154-163

Abstract: We report findings from a survey regarding the lay perception of the causes of the worldwide economic and financial crisis. Respondents (N=2245) from a variety of countries were included: China (Hong Kong), Turkey, Russia, Israel, Germany, USA, and France. We have previously documented a range of factors that affects lay understanding of the crisis The present study expanded the database and focuses on the combination of factors that jointly predict whether the respondents view the crisis as a complex impersonal system that malfunctioned, or hold a moral/intentional view about its origins. We show that respondents from Western World countries, who were unaffected by the crisis and have economic training, interpret the crisis differently from all other respondents (i.e., those living in Turkey, Russia, or Hong Kong, and those who were personally affected by the crisis or without economic training). These differences have important implications on how policies are perceived and evaluated by the public, and should inform how they are presented to the public.

Keywords: Lay understanding; Financial crisis; Social representations; Naive economic cognition; Culture; Classification tree analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 A29 E6 E60 G1 H3 P1 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487016000155
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Differing conceptions of the causes of the economic crisis: Effects of culture, economic training, and personal impact (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:53:y:2016:i:c:p:154-163

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2016.02.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().