Knowledge and Beliefs About Behavioral Biases

Armando Holzknecht (), Jürgen Huber, Michael Kirchler and Teresa Steinbacher ()

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: We study knowledge and beliefs about behavioral biases among behavioral scientists, financial professionals, and the general population. In experiment 1 with 547 participants, we measure knowledge of ten prominent biases and elicit beliefs about the knowledge levels of each group. We show that knowledge is highest among behavioral scientists and lowest in the general population with significant pairwise differences for most comparisons. We report that each subject pool has the highest accuracy in beliefs for their own group, correctly guessing 59% to 74% of the most frequent answer category. As a robustness check we conduct experiment 2 with 1,260 participants from the general population using a 2 × 2 factorial design to examine agreement bias and rephrasing of bias descriptions into simple language. In addition, we include a conceptual replication of the bias blind spot reported by Scopelliti et al. (2015). We report strong agreement bias across all biases and that knowledge is lower when respondents need to disagree with a statement to demonstrate understanding. Finally, we confirm the bias blind spot in the general population, reporting the tendency to see biases much more in others than in themselves.

Keywords: Behavioral biases; expert beliefs; behavioral scientists; financial professionals. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 G40 G53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-fle and nep-knm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inn:wpaper:2024-13

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