Harnessing Emotional Connections to Improve Financial Decisions: Evaluating the Impact of Financial Education in Mainstream Media

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Savings By and For the Poor: A Research Review and Agenda

“…Two U.S. studies suggest that social learning can have a strong effect on savings behavior (Duflo and Saez, 2003;Beshears et al, 2012), and we suspect that literatures on social networks are generating insights on how to best-harness such effects. Similarly, Berg and Zia (2013) randomly offers middle-and low-income viewers in South Africa monetary incentives to watch one of two soap operas airing on overlapping time slots, one of which embeds exemplars of responsible and irresponsible financial behaviors while the other does not modify content along these lines. While the study finds no effect on general financial literacy, the treatment group scored 4.5 percentage points higher on average on questions related to financial issues that were specifically addressed in the soap opera.…”

Visual strategies for co-design with a community partner

“…Figure 2: Two frames from the soap opera Scandal!, E Television, NFH productions, in collaboration with World Bank, South Africa, 2012 An assessment of this campaign showed that viewers remembered the incidents in the storyline with a high degree of accuracy, but few remembered the NDMA counsellor who had appeared briefly, and fewer still remembered the public service announcement (Berg & Zia, 2013). The researchers speculated that the primary reason for these findings was that retention was dependent upon the level of emotional connection that the viewers felt with the primary character, the counsellor character, and the strictly informational announcement.…”

“…The written narrative of Emma's Story (see Figure 1 above) demonstrates the emotional and psychological nature of an individual's financial decisions and encourages NTFP clients to identify these factors in their own financial decisions. This personal identification is believed to help clients change their financial behaviours (Berg & Zia, 2013). By translating the story into a narrative visualisation, we hoped to encourage positive changes in clients' personal financial behaviours.…”

“…Recently, in efforts to focus financial literacy programs around the kinds of real financial factors that individuals face, the OECD and other organizations have begun to use case studies, narratives and explorations of new media (Lusardi et al, 2015;Berg & Zia, 2013). The role of narrative visualisations in creating effective financial literacy materials has been previously discussed by the authors .…”

Learning Millennial-Style

“…Addressing poor financial literacy is clearly a first order concern (e.g., Carlin and Robinson, 2012), but efforts to ameliorate this problem have not taken advantage of millennial-style learning. Indeed, it appears that "just in time" financial education may be superior to traditional channels (Fernandes, Lynch, and Netemeyer, 2014), videos can enhance financial literacy (Heinberg et al, 2014), and vicarious learning through entertainment can be quite effective (Berg & Zia 2013).…”