The Psychology of Economic Attitudes – Moral Foundations Predict Economic Attitudes beyond Socio-Demographic Variables

Abstract

The present study had three goals: to construct a relevant questionnaire of economic attitudes, to examine the role of socio-demographic variables in explaining the economic attitudes as measured by that questionnaire, and to check whether moral foundations, as a psychological construct, can contribute to understanding the economic attitudes beyond socio-demographic variables. The results indicated that the economic attitudes were better explained by two factors instead of one: the Role of the State in the Economy (ROSE) and the Problems with the Current Economic System (PCES). Both socio-demographic variables and moral foundations explained significant amounts of the variance in the results on the two subscales. Regarding the ROSE subscale, socio-demographic variables explained 25 percent, while moral foundations explained the additional 21 percent of the variance, resulting in this model explaining 46 percent of the variance in the ROSE results. Regarding the PCES subscale, the socio-demographic variables explained 20 percent of the variance, and moral foundations added another 10 percent resulting in 30 percent of the variance on PCES results being explained by this model. The results speak in favor of including the psychological variables in the studies of economic attitudes and behaviors, and indicate that economic concerns are not only economic in their nature, but also moral.

Keywords

• economic attitudes
• role of the state
• problems with the economy
• moral foundations
• psychology