An Exploration of Gender Bias, Framing, and Student Loan Decisions Through an Experimental Design

As student loan debt is one of the fastest growing concerns for American households today, we need to understand the decision making behind student loan behavior to deal with the high student loan debt level properly. For this purpose, following a behavioral economics framework, we examine how varia...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of family and economic issues Vol. 41; no. 2; pp. 350 - 363
Main Authors Mountain, Travis P., Kim, Namhoon, Gutter, Michael S., Kiss, Elizabeth, Cho, Soo Hyun, Johnson, Carrie L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.06.2020
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Behavioral economics
Bias
College students
Debt
Decision making
Discrimination
Experimental design
Family
Frame analysis
Gender
Higher education
Households
Loans
Original Paper
Personality and Social Psychology
Research design
Sexism
Social Policy
Social Sciences
Sociology
Student debt
Student loans
Students
Wisdom
Framing and reference points
Gender
Student loan
Implicit bias
Online experiment
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Summary:As student loan debt is one of the fastest growing concerns for American households today, we need to understand the decision making behind student loan behavior to deal with the high student loan debt level properly. For this purpose, following a behavioral economics framework, we examine how variation in framing scenarios including gender bias, negative and positive framing, and aspiration for college degree framing, affects participant’s perceptions about the wisdom of using student loans and appropriate borrowing amounts. To analyze these framing affects, we obtained 1847 participants through an online survey describing a hypothetical student’s considerations related to attending college. We applied nonlinear regression with probit analysis and found that participants in the experiment had an implicit gender bias by recommending higher student loan debt for men than for women. However, additional information regarding the value of a college degree given in the female scenario encouraged them to take student loans and increase the amount of student loans.
ISSN:1058-0476
1573-3475
DOI:10.1007/s10834-019-09640-4