Childhood poverty and its impact on financial decision making under threat: A preregistered replication of Griskevicius et al. (2011b).

Abstract

We investigated the influence of childhood poverty on financial decision making under threat by replicating the findings of Griskevicius et al. (2011b), which found that individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to make riskier financial decisions and prefer immediate over delayed gratification when exposed to mortality cues. Following an extension of life history theory to individual behaviors, the original research argued that these behaviors reflect a faster and riskier strategy to cope with survival threats. In a preregistered replication using the same procedures and instruments as the original study, we tested this hypothesis with a sample size 14.2 times larger than the original (1,010 vs. 71). We replicated the effect of mortality salience on risk-taking for people who experienced childhood poverty but with a substantially smaller effect size (η² = 0.004 vs. η² = 0.17 in the original). We failed to find any effect on time preferences in contrast to the original study's medium effect size (η² = 0.046). Although our findings partially support the results of Griskevicius et al. (2011b) on poverty and financial decision making, the drastically reduced effect sizes challenge the practical significance of these findings. Our replication results underscore the importance of large sample studies in understanding the effects of childhood socioeconomic status on future life decisions. They also suggest that frameworks beyond life history theory may be needed to reliably capture such relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).