Sleepiness Moderates the Associations between Personality and Financial Risk Tolerance and Spending Habits among College Students

ABSTRACT

Objectives

Personality and sleep characteristics are related to financial attitudes and behaviors. However, to our knowledge no study has examined how personality and sleep may be conjointly associated with these financial outcomes. The present study examined sleepiness as a moderator of the associations between college students’ personality traits and financial risk tolerance and spending habits.

Methods

Undergraduates (N = 177, 77% women, 78% White) self-reported their personality traits and sleepiness using well-established questionnaires. Financial attitudes and behaviors were assessed via students’ self-reported responses to a set of scenarios assessing risk tolerance as well as their spending habits over the prior two weeks.

Results

Multiple regression analyses were run. Across five significant two-way interactions, high levels of sleepiness exacerbated risk for greater financial risk tolerance and higher spending among those characterized by high open-mindedness and low neuroticism, whereas low sleepiness increased protection for lower risk tolerance and less spending among those high in agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Conclusions

Sleepiness may act as both a vulnerability and protective factor in relations between personality and financial attitudes and behaviors. Improvements in sleepiness, which is modifiable via intervention, may have significant implications for individuals’ financial well-being.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the students who participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

The authors do not have any conflicts of interest to declare.

Data availability of statement

The data supporting this paper are available upon reasonable request.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15402002.2022.2154212.

Notes

¹ In preliminary analyses, we also examined subjective sleep quality (using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI); Buysse et al., 1989) as a moderator of associations between personality traits and financial behaviors and attitudes. The findings followed a very similar pattern of effects to those for sleepiness, but were less robust. This may be because sleepiness is more closely connected to an individual’s sleep-wake state than sleep quality, as there are individual differences in the experience of the same level of sleep quality (Hisler & Krizan, 2019). This discrepancy may also be due to differences in the timescale of each questionnaire, as the ESS does not reference a specific timeframe, but the PSQI inquires about sleep in the past month. For succinctness these results are not included in the main paper and can be found in Supplementary Materials.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a start-up grant and Office of Undergraduate Research funding from Colgate University to Lauren Philbrook.