Abigail B. Sussman

• University of Chicago

Job loss is a common and disruptive life event. It is known to have numerous long-term negative effects on financial, health, and social outcomes. While the negative effects of becoming unemployed on health and well-being are well understood, the influence of job loss on financial decisions has received little attention. Across a large-scale survey...

Unpredictable income poses a significant threat to economic stability for many U.S. households. While budgeting may help to mitigate some of the negative effects of unpredictable income, the process of budgeting can also be more challenging under such circumstances. This paper presents new descriptive evidence on the relationship between income pre...

In the last two years, consumers have experienced massive changes in consumption – whether due to shifts in habits; the changing information landscape; challenges to their identity, or new economic experiences of scarcity or abundance. What can we expect from these experiences? How are the world's leading thinkers applying both foundational knowled...

In early March 2020, two crises emerged: the COVID-19 public health crisis and a corresponding economic crisis resulting from business closures and skyrocketing job losses. While the link between socioeconomic status and infectious disease is well-documented, the psychological relationships among economic considerations, such as financial constrain...

People evaluate their own wealth differently from how they evaluate the wealth of others. Across six experiments, we find evidence that people focus disproportionately on debt when thinking about their own (vs. another person's) wealth. In Experiments 1–3, participants predicted how wealthy they or someone else would be in one year, assuming they h...

Although budgeting is widely considered a common method of managing household finances, surprisingly little is known about the budgeting process. Using a nationally-representative survey (N=3,826) of US adults, we examine budgeting behaviors and beliefs, including who budgets and why, how individuals categorize consumption, and how they adjust thei...

Millions of eligible families did not claim their 2021 expanded child tax credit (CTC), collectively forgoing billions of dollars. To address this problem, many policymakers focused on increasing awareness of the CTC by highlighting that families could receive up to $3,600 a year per child. However, people rarely budget on a yearly basis. We propos...

Textbook models assume that investors try to insure against bad states of the world associated with specific risk factors when investing. This is a testable assumption and we develop a survey framework for doing so. Our framework can be applied to any risk factor. We demonstrate the approach using consumption growth, which makes our results applica...

U.S. households currently hold $770 billion in credit card debt, often managing repayments across multiple accounts. The authors investigate how minimum payment requirements (i.e., the requirement to allocate at least some money to each account with a balance) alter consumers’ allocation strategies across multiple accounts. Across four experiments,...

Consumers display an expense prediction bias in which they underpredict their future spending. The authors propose this bias occurs in large part because: 1) consumers base their predictions on typical expenses that come to mind easily during prediction, 2) taken together, typical expenses lead to a prediction near the mode of a consumer’s expense...

When people make financial decisions, they need not only think about their current financial situation, but also about changes in future wealth. This work investigates people's beliefs about their future wealth and how these beliefs impact financial decisions. Using a joint experimental and computational cognitive modeling approach, we show that pe...

When people make financial decisions, they need not only think about their current financial situation, but also about changes in future wealth. This work investigates people's beliefs about their future wealth and how these beliefs impact financial decisions. Using a joint experimental and computational cognitive modeling approach, we show that pe...

Development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine is widely considered as one of the best paths to ending the current health crisis. While the ability to distribute a vaccine in the short-term remains uncertain, the availability of a vaccine alone will not be sufficient to stop disease spread. Instead, policy makers will need to overcome the additional...

This paper introduces a novel distinction between foods as a function of the frequency with which consumers eat them, and investigates how this distinction influences dietary beliefs and decisions. It compares food types perceived to be consumed relatively infrequently (i.e., infrequent foods) to those perceived to be consumed relatively frequently...

Four studies, across a range of domains, all find evidence of a dragging-down effect in which consumers purchase fewer units of a product when a discount applies to a larger (vs. smaller) number of units. In each case, and in contrast to basic economic principles, this purchasing pattern leads consumers to purchase more units of the same item when...

Beliefs about how effective a cause will be at achieving possible outcomes are critical inputs into a range of decisions, from how to treat an illness to which products to purchase. We identify scope—the number of distinct outcomes a cause is known to achieve—as an important input into judgments of efficacy. We compare causes that lead to worse out...

Experts estimate that there could be millions of cases of COVID-19 in the US, leading to potentially 100,000 or more deaths. Beliefs about the severity of the spread of COVID-19 and one's own likelihood of being infected have implications for individual behavior and consequently for the spread of the virus. The current research explores key factors...

One in five consumer credit accounts incur late fees each quarter. Evidence on the efficacy of regulations to improve behavior through enhanced disclosure of financial product attributes is mixed. We test a novel form of disclosure that provides borrowers with a personalized measure of their creditworthiness. In a field experiment with over 400,000...

Examining a shock to the salience of the sustainability of the U.S. mutual fund market, we present causal evidence that investors marketwide value sustainability: being categorized as low sustainability resulted in net outflows of more than $12 billion while being categorized as high sustainability led to net inflows of more than $24 billion. Exper...

Recent research has aimed to understand how people consider financial decisions because they have important consequences for well‐being. Yet existing research has largely failed to examine how attitudes and behaviors vary as a function of the specific financial product (e.g., debt type). We ask to what extent people differentiate between similarly...

Improving tax attitudes and mitigating the effects of negative tax attitudes can help policy makers fund government operations and gain support from citizens. Beliefs both about tax payments (e.g., how much a person owes) and benefits (e.g., who gains from government revenue) affect attitudes toward taxes. But, these beliefs often reflect misunders...

Low incomes, limited financial literacy, fraud, and deception are just a few of the many intractable economic and social factors that contribute to the financial difficulties that households face today. Addressing these issues directly is difficult and costly. But poor financial outcomes also result from systematic psychological tendencies, includi...

The current research documents a novel pattern of preferences across nominally equivalent outcomes. When evaluating the outcome of completed experiences, people are sensitive to the magnitude of component (i.e., gross) gains and losses rather than responding solely to the net outcomes. However, people do not consistently favor outcomes that minimiz...

When forming a judgment about any unknown item, people must draw inferences from information that is already known. This paper examines causal relationships between cues as a relevant factor influencing how people determine the amount of weight to place on each piece of available evidence. We propose that people draw from their beliefs about specif...

U.S. consumers currently hold $880 billion in revolving debt, with a mean household credit card balance of approximately $6,000. Although economic factors play a role in this societal issue, it is clear that psychological forces also affect consumers' decisions to take on and maintain unmanageable debt balances. We examine three psychological barri...

Maintaining savings is an important financial goal. Yet there are times when savings should be spent, such as when people face unavoidable costs, and spending their savings allows them to avoid high interest rate debt. Existing behavioral research has focused on consumer decisions between savings and discretionary spending and has proposed interven...

Why do consumers make the purchases they do, and which ones make them truly happy? Why are consumers willing to spend huge sums of money to appear high status? This handbook addresses these key questions and many more. It provides a comprehensive overview of consumer psychology, examining cutting-edge research at the individual, interpersonal, and...

Many articles have examined the psychological drivers of charitable giving, but little is known about how people mentally budget for charitable gifts. The present research aims to address this gap by investigating how perceptions of donations as exceptional (uncommon and infrequent) rather than ordinary (common and frequent) expenses might affect b...

Recent research has identified several judgment and decision making tendencies associated with right-leaning political ideologies that are difficult (if not impossible) to explain in terms of stable, negative affective appraisals because they (1) are uncorrelated with the negativity of the stimuli being considered, (2) do not reflect divergent affe...

Although democracies should ideally elect leaders based on their abilities, voters are often biased by seemingly unrelated factors, such as a candidate's appearance. Prior work examining the relations between election outcomes and appearance has primarily focused on a restricted range of the top candidates, examined in pairwise comparisons. In the...

Categories often have unobservable diagnostic features. For example, if a person is a lawyer, one might expect him to be both well dressed and knowledgeable about the law. However, without observing the person in a courtroom, one cannot tell whether or not he is knowledgeable about the law. How might we categorize the well-dressed person before we...

Purchases fall along a continuum from ordinary (common or frequent) to exceptional (unusual or infrequent), with many of the largest expenses (e.g., electronics, celebrations) being the most exceptional. Across seven studies, we show that, while people are fairly adept at budgeting and predicting how much they will spend on ordinary items, they bot...

Previous research suggests that voting in elections is influenced by appearance-based personality inferences (e.g., whether a political candidate has a competent-looking face). However, since voters cannot objectively evaluate politicians’ personality traits, it remains to be seen whether appearance-based inferences about a characteristic continue...

We studied the perception of wealth as a function of varying levels of assets and debt. We found that with total wealth held constant, people with positive net worth feel and are seen as wealthier when they have lower debt (despite having fewer assets). In contrast, people with equal but negative net worth feel and are considered wealthier when the...

Tax collection is critical for the proper functioning of society. However, many people strongly dislike paying taxes. Although this distaste could be rational on economic grounds, the authors show that this attitude extends beyond simply disliking the costs incurred and affects behavior in counternormative ways. They demonstrate the phenomenon of t...

How do people combine cues to form judgments? Recent debate has focused on whether and when individuals use heuristics versus linear models. We propose instead that people may rely on an understanding of the causal relationships between cues to determine how much weight to place on each one. Predictions of the causal model approach match those of l...

What makes a good explanation? We examine the function of latent scope, i.e., the number of unobserved phenomena that an explanation can account for. We show that individuals prefer narrow latent scope explanations-those that account for fewer unobserved effects-to broader explanations. In Experiments 1a-d, participants found narrow latent scope ex...