Are equity investors really greedy, selfish gamblers?

Most people believe those who own shares are greedier, more selfish and more inclined to gamble than those who don't. New research across 11 countries finds that this belief predicts whether someone invests, and that it bears no relation to how much they know about money. The belief is also exaggerated, though not invented.

Offer someone a coin-flip bet with the odds and the expected value spelled out in advance, and whether they take it depends on what you call it.

Luca Henkel and Christian Pugnaghi-Zimpelmann put exactly that question to 515 Americans who owned no shares. Described as a ticket in a random draw, the bet was taken in 52 per cent of decisions. Described as buying a share in an MSCI World ETF, the identical bet was taken in 38 per cent. Same money, same probabilities, same payment on the same day. Under the random-draw wording, 19 per cent never took the risky option. Under the share wording, 36 per cent didn't.

Nothing had changed except the word.

What people think of share owners

The experiment sits inside a study, published in the Review of Financial Studies, that surveyed nearly 8,500 people in 11 countries, including the UK. Respondents rated two groups, those who own risky financial assets and those who don't, on three traits: greed, selfishness and a tendency to gamble.

In the Netherlands, where the researchers could link survey answers to tax records, 81 per cent rated share owners more negatively than non-owners. Across all 11 countries, 64 per cent did, ranging from 49 to 73 per cent by country. In every country, share owners came out worse.

One trait does more work than the others. Asked to guess how much of a gambler each group says it is, the Dutch respondents overstated the real difference by 119.3 per cent, the largest exaggeration of the three. Meanwhile, in a separate sample on the other side of the Atlantic, people were turning down a share and taking a lottery ticket instead. Two countries, two methods, both halves of the same contradiction.

Nor do the negative views come from not knowing much about money. They were uncorrelated with financial numeracy, stock market knowledge, expectations about returns, or trust in bankers and advisers.

The researchers argue the mechanism is identity. Half of the Dutch non-investors agreed that not holding risky investments was an important part of who they are. Forty-one per cent agreed they were 'proud to not own risky financial investments'. Asked to split a €100 endowment between two strangers matched for income and wealth, one an investor and one not, they gave €67.23 to the non-investor. That is twice what they gave the investor, and a stronger in-group preference than the same people showed for their own nationals over foreigners.

The part that is true

The caricature is not invented. Share owners in the Dutch sample did rate themselves as greedier, more selfish and more gambler-like than non-owners. In a real donation task they gave 6 percentage points less to charity. The public puts that gap at 15 percentage points, more than double the real one.

What matters is where the difference sits. Among people who call themselves moderately greedy, selfish or gambler-like, owners and non-owners are almost indistinguishable. At the extreme end, scoring seven to ten out of ten, share owners are twice as likely to be there. They were also over 75 per cent more likely to keep an entire $100 windfall rather than share any of it.

The authors explain the stereotype through the representativeness heuristic: because the extremes are disproportionately investors, investors get read as extreme.

I would go a step further. The tail does not stay in the tail. It is the most visible part of investing, the part that gets the films, the advertising and the coverage, and it ends up doing the describing for everyone else. There is some support for that in the data. Asked about particular kinds of investor rather than investors in general, people rated those holding index funds and socially responsible funds significantly less harshly, and those using derivatives worse.

Where the line actually falls

The evidence has limits. The experiments used online panels of a few hundred American non-investors making small bets, not people committing savings. The information treatment that improved attitudes closed only about a quarter of the gap the wording had created.

One detail of the study's design outlasts all of that. Its definition of ownership covers direct holdings only. Workplace pensions are excluded, and most of the Dutch participants were enrolled in schemes holding equities.

So a good many of these proud non-investors already own shares. They don't count it, because nobody ever asked them to choose. What separates the two groups is not exposure to the stock market. It is whether they ever decided to have any.

Resources

Henkel, L., & Pugnaghi-Zimpelmann, C. (2026). Proud to not own stocks: How identity shapes financial decisions. The Review of Financial Studies. Advance online publication.

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