| Summary: | In four experiments
we showed that investors are not only interested in maximizing returns but have
non-financial goals, too. We considered what drives the decision to invest
ethically and the impact this strategy has on people's evaluation of investment
performance. In Study 1, participants who chose a moral portfolio (over an
immoral one) reported being less interested in maximizing their gains and more
interested in being true to their moral values. These participants also
reported feeling lower disappointment upon learning that a different decision
could have yield a better outcome. In Studies 2 and 3, we replicated these
findings when investors decided not to invest in immoral assets, rather than
when they choose to invest morally. In Study 4, we found similar results using
the same industrial sector in both the moral and the immoral conditions and
providing participants with information about the expected return of the
portfolio they were presented with. These findings lend empirical support to
the conclusion that investors have both utilitarian (financial) goals and
expressive (non-financial) ones and show how non-financial motivations can
influence the reaction to unsatisfactory investment performance.
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