Who's Influenced by Behavioral Biases? Everyone
There's a financial impact to investing biases.
There's a financial impact to investing biases.
Overconfidence and impatience are usually a bad combination. In investing, it can be destructive.
Take the case of Robinhood. In reference to the short-selling squeeze that gripped investors on Robinhood and similar platforms a month ago, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) vice chairman Charlie Munger stated that it was irresponsible “to have a culture which encourages [so] much gambling in stocks by people who have the mindset of racetrack bettors and, of course, it will create trouble, as it did.”
Around the same time, Robinhood aired its infamous TV commercial at Superbowl LV that stated plainly: “You don’t need to become an investor. You were born one.”
But the trouble is that we aren’t born to be investors. At least, not good ones.
Effective investing doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Even when we know the fundamentals, we tend to make snap decisions and irrational--sometimes destructive--mistakes, based on what “feels” right. The gamification built into platforms like Robinhood—free stock for signing up, frequently updating and colorful screens based on performance, even digital confetti upon completion of a successful transaction—may at times, just worsen these tendencies.
In a study we conducted on a nationally representative sample of the U.S population, we found evidence that although most Americans are overconfident (67% of the sample), people currently in Generation Z are significantly more overconfident--even more than millennials and Gen Xers. We also know that Robinhood’s average user is 31 years old, and half of them are first-time investors. This premise of innate investing knowledge, combined with a platform that rewards hasty decisions with immediate gratification and self-flattery, makes for a breeding ground of biased decisions.
In “The Financial Impact of Behavioral Biases,” we further explored this topic to unpack the specifics about who’s subject to certain biases. Now, more than ever, it’s important to understand these investor biases--what they are, how they affect us, and what we can do to avoid them.
In our research, we found that nearly all respondents showed signs of multiple investor biases—with a staggering 98% of the sample exhibiting at least one bias. Specifically:
Interestingly, we also found demographic factors that could help dispel some common misperceptions about these behavioral biases. Our overconfidence result stating that younger people tend to be more overconfident is the only strong example of a demographic difference. Otherwise, for example, we found no statistically significant differences in most biases between genders, indicating that one gender is not "more biased" than the other.
We know now that investor biases are not an anomaly, and we shouldn’t underestimate their power.
Our research explored the different ways in which they could affect our lives, finding that individual level differences in bias scores were strongly correlated with real-world outcomes like financial health, net worth, saving and spending habits, and so on.
For instance, compared with people with low bias, people who showed high levels of overconfidence were twice as likely to be struggling with their financial lives: having the lowest savings, the highest debt, and the worst credit scores. These results hold true for most of our behavioral biases and can even be translated to real-life account balances: For example, while controlling for age and income, with a standard deviation increase in base rate neglect scores, credit card debt amounts increased by 0.18% (p<0.05) on average, while savings account balances fell by 0.55% (p<0.001) on average.
One explanation of biases’ correlation with fewer assets is that a person’s biases are manifesting in detrimental financial behavior. For example, we found that when compared with people with high present bias, people with low bias are:
All these results were significant at p<0.05.
This held true for other behavioral biases as well. People with high overconfidence were 3.33 times less likely to save for retirement (p<0.05), while people with low base rate neglect are 2.85 times more likely to save for emergencies (p<0.001).
Interestingly, we also found that, at times, behavioral bias measures are better correlated with financial outcomes than these traditional predictors of financial health. A person’s level of education, for instance, has a 27% correlation with their financial health (p<0.001). In contrast, overconfidence and base rate neglect scores have a negative 33% (p<0.001) and negative 45% (p<0.001) correlation with financial health.
It’s clear that our biases hurt us. So who do we turn to for help? One of the big challenges we face in helping overcome investors’ biases is that we think they only apply to them--they really apply to all of us. In a review of the literature from Russo & Schoemaker and Cooke, we found that experts suffer from a similar overconfidence: Self-confidence outstrips expertise.
This holds for advisors and investing. In a study conducted on advisor’s biases, researchers found that:
So, while it’s true that investors are susceptible to behavioral biases, it seems that advisors aren’t immune either.
We’re all a little biased. When it comes to our finances, we’ve found that they can do real harm. More importantly, it’s always possible that biases can have a broad impact on the way we think about the world around us. We must, investors and advisors alike, recognize biases for what they are and take active steps to avoid them in our financial lives.
Sarwari Das does not own (actual or beneficial) shares in any of the securities mentioned above. Find out about Morningstar’s editorial policies.
Transparency is how we protect the integrity of our work and keep empowering investors to achieve their goals and dreams. And we have unwavering standards for how we keep that integrity intact, from our research and data to our policies on content and your personal data.
We’d like to share more about how we work and what drives our day-to-day business.
We sell different types of products and services to both investment professionals and individual investors. These products and services are usually sold through license agreements or subscriptions. Our investment management business generates asset-based fees, which are calculated as a percentage of assets under management. We also sell both admissions and sponsorship packages for our investment conferences and advertising on our websites and newsletters.
How we use your information depends on the product and service that you use and your relationship with us. We may use it to:
To learn more about how we handle and protect your data, visit our privacy center.
Maintaining independence and editorial freedom is essential to our mission of empowering investor success. We provide a platform for our authors to report on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investor’s point of view. We also respect individual opinions––they represent the unvarnished thinking of our people and exacting analysis of our research processes. Our authors can publish views that we may or may not agree with, but they show their work, distinguish facts from opinions, and make sure their analysis is clear and in no way misleading or deceptive.
To further protect the integrity of our editorial content, we keep a strict separation between our sales teams and authors to remove any pressure or influence on our analyses and research.
Read our editorial policy to learn more about our process.