Individual differences in susceptibility to financial bullshit

What is the effect of seemingly impressive verbal financial assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually meaningless; that is, financial pseudo-profound bullshit? We develop and validate a novel measurement scale to assess consumers ability to detect and distinguish financial bullshit. We show that this financial bullshit scale captures a unique construct that is only moderately correlated with related constructs such as financial knowledge, numeracy, and cognitive reflection. Consumers particular vulnerable to financial bullshit are more likely to be young, male, have a higher income, and be overconfident with regards to their own financial knowledge. The ability to detect and distinguish financial bullshit also predicts financial well-being while being less predictive of consumers self-reported financial behavior, suggesting that susceptibility to financial bullshit is linked to affective rather than behavioral reactions. Our findings have implications for the understanding of how financial communication impacts consumer decision making and financial well-being.Funding Agencies|Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation, Sweden [W19-0018]Licensing: This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).