Nudging laypersons to participate in financial speculations

We study the institution of pseudo-investment, that is, the placement of money by a layperson under the influence of a media personality who acts as a referral leader actively attracting naïve investors to high-risk yet high return project. We relied on four conceptual frameworks: household financialization as a part of critical macroeconomics; nudging, or pushing consumers to behave in a particular way, treated in our case as a set of unethical tools to pursue narrowly defined self-interest of a referral leader; original institutionalist evolutionary theory to identify behavioral patterns and motives which are targets to involve individuals or their groups in pseudo-investment schemes; reasoned action approach to structure the findings in the context of social psychology. Empirical data comprises the array of text extracted from the introductory video webinars on four investing courses authored by four financial consultants whose activities are featured by the sings of a funnel scam. Discourse analysis implied special attention to manipulative “nudges” financial consultants apply and people’s motives they refer to. Our findings confirm that, attempting to involve individuals into pseudo-investing, referral leaders exploit unproductive patterns related to self-regard proclivity in human nature (greed, self-interest, acquisitiveness, idleness, pecuniary emulation, ostentatious motives in consumption, the desire for undeserved profit, predatory habits, etc.). We also found that productive behavior (such as labor efforts, education activities, and nonspeculative professional engagement) is rendered less important than predatory motives which are hidden behind false care, empathy, and compassion. We claim that the conceptual difference between productive and unproductive behavior patterns, motives and values remains relevant in the contemporary society. Mixed method research and a combination of concepts from various research fields explain why this paper adds to academic literature in behavioral and institutional economics, social psychology, as well as critical macroeconomics research related to financialization and its effects.