An attitude formation task examined how conservatives and liberals explore information about novel stimuli and form attitudes towards them. When framed as the BeanFest game, conservatives sampled fewer beans and exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry (i.e., better learning for negative than positive beans) than liberals. This has been taken as strong evidence that conservatives are more sensitive to negative stimuli than liberals. We argue that the learning asymmetry and sampling bias by conservatives is due to framing of the game. In addition to the BeanFest, we framed the game as StockFest (i.e., a stock market game) where participants learned about novel stocks. We replicated the pronounced learning asymmetry for conservatives in the BeanFest game, but found a pronounced learning asymmetry for liberals in the StockFest game. We suggest that conservatives and liberals are equally sensitive to negative stimuli but in different domains.

Conspiracy beliefs have negative effects on decision making in several life areas including health, ethical, political and environmental domains. But their influence on financial decisions is not known. The current study examines the mediational role of social trust in the relationship between non-financial conspiracy beliefs and stock market participation. First, exploratory findings provide preliminary cross-country evidence that conspiracy beliefs are associated with lower stock market participation.Next, three studies from close to 53,000 United States respondents show that conspiracy beliefs predict 8%-20% decrease in the odds of investing in stocks even after adjusting for several determinants of stock ownership including income, life satisfaction, cognitive ability and economic attitudes. Mediation analyses shows that conspiracy beliefs predict lower social trust, which in turn predicts lower stock ownership.Overall, the findings imply that endorsing misleading non-financial beliefs about the causes of socio-cultural events may potential impede financial decision making.

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Conservatives perceive the world as a more dangerous and threatening place than liberals, which explains conservatives' more cautious social behaviors and their greater support for policies (e.g., anti-immigration and harsher punitive measures) that aim to manage and reduce perceived threats and uncertainties. However, past research operationalized the "world" as a place replete with social and physical threats (e.g., street crimes and terrorism). Less attention has been given to the economic world, which is equally characterized by threatening events (e.g., corporate crimes, stock market crashes). In four studies, we examined whether differences in appraisal of the economic world explain ideological differences in stock market participation and neoliberal economic policy preferences. The findings reveal that liberals perceive the stock market as a more dangerous and riskier place than conservatives. This asymmetry explains liberals' cautious investment behaviors, their greater support for regulation of the stock market, and their greater opposition to privatization of Social Security. We argue that liberals' greater support for these policies serves to protect investors and the general public from the perceived harms of the economic world. Our findings suggest that the psychological processes underlying threat management and uncertainty reduction are similar for conservatives and liberals, but these processes are context dependent.

In response to Ruisch et al., 2020, British Journal of Psychology, we propose that the assessment of domain‐general ideological differences requires systematic stimulus sampling. We argue that there is currently no evidence that the ‘neutral’ BeanFest assesses domain‐general ideological differences and that Ruisch et al., 2020, British Journal of Psychology findings do not address the mechanism(s) underlying our findings.