Will Crypto become the currency of Cultural Narcissism?
Thursday, July 4, 2024. Leaving Vermont.
In a survey of 2,001 Americans, crypto ownership was also associated with being male and high-income, consuming fringe media, and reporting feelings of victimhood.
Owning cryptocurrency isn't just about dodging financial norms—it's about embodying a certain set of personality traits and demographics, according to a study published on July 3, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
Shane Littrell from the University of Toronto, along with colleagues from the University of Miami, USA, spearheaded this dive into the psyche of crypto enthusiasts.
The Anonymous Alchemy of Crypto Culture
Cryptocurrency is the wild west of finance, marked by anonymous trading and unregulated markets. While some see it as a volatile gamble, millions of investors worldwide are rolling the dice.
This study shines a light on the political, psychological, and social quirks that set crypto investors apart from the rest of us boring old fiat currency users.
Previous studies, albeit smaller, have pegged crypto owners as psychologically non-normative and politically offbeat. Littrell and his team took it a step further, polling 2,001 American adults in 2022. Around 30% admitted to dabbling in crypto.
Participants shared their demographic details and answered questions that revealed their political, psychological, and social stripes. The researchers then ran several bivariate (two-variable) correlational analyses to see how crypto ownership meshed with other traits. They also performed a multivariate (multi-variable) regression analysis to pinpoint which traits best predict cryptocurrency ownership.
Conspiracies, Extremes, and the Dark Side
The findings? Crypto ownership aligns with a belief in conspiracy theories, support for political extremism, and a fondness for non-traditional political orientations (like Christian Nationalism). Oh, and let’s not forget the "Dark Tetrad" (formerly the Dark Triad) of personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. (Yikes!)
The more nuanced analysis highlighted that relying on fringe social media sources for news is the top predictor of crypto ownership. Other key traits? Being male, argumentative, high-income, and feeling like a victim.
Crypto owners reported a mishmash of political identities, spanning both left and right spectrums.
Limitations and Future Directions
The researchers caution that their findings are limited by their sample size and the self-reported nature of the data, which means we can't jump to causation conclusions just yet. But these early, modest findings are curious and compelling.
They suggest future research should dig deeper into how specific media sources and rhetoric sway crypto ownership.
In their own words: “Though our results certainly do not apply to every crypto user out there, on average, we found that crypto investment and ownership tends to appeal to people who are more argumentative, anti-authoritarian, and prefer to get their news from non-mainstream social media sites.
There is still much work to be done in this area, but we hope our study helps lay the groundwork for future research aimed at understanding the psychological, political, and behavioral factors associated with this growing financial movement.”
The Paper Trail
The paper, “The political, psychological, and social correlates of cryptocurrency ownership,” was published in PLOS ONE on July 3, 2024. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (#2123635), which had no hand in designing the study, collecting and analyzing the data, deciding to publish, or prepping the manuscript.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
