Category: English

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Prince Sarpong, Associate professor, University of the Free State

Corporate leaders and billionaires are often viewed as visionaries and wealth creators. But beneath the surface, many are trapped in an invisible financial “crisis” – one rooted not in market volatility or poor investments but in their psychological relationship with money.

As a finance professor and editor of the forthcoming book “Financial Therapy for Men,” I study this often overlooked aspect of financial psychology. Money is far more than numbers on a balance sheet – it carries emotional, psychological and social meaning. People’s relationships with money are shaped by childhood experiences, cultural beliefs and personal triumphs and failures. This emotional baggage can influence not only their sense of safety and self-worth but also how they manage power and status.

The field of financial therapy emerged in the mid-2000s to address these dynamics. Drawing from behavioral economics, financial psychology, family systems theory and clinical therapy, it aims to help people understand how their thoughts, feelings and experiences shape financial behavior. Foundational academic work began at Kansas State University, home to one of the first graduate-level programs in the field.

Since then, financial therapy has gained traction in the U.S. and globally: It’s supported by a peer-reviewed journal and is increasingly integrated into professional practice by financial advisers and licensed therapists. Studies have shown that financial therapy can improve relationships and reduce emotional distress.

Yet much of the field focuses on people who are emotionally open and reflective – neglecting executives, who are often socialized to view themselves as purely rational decision-makers. I think this is a mistake.

Research shows that people often project their unconscious anxieties onto markets, experiencing them as mirrors of competence, failure or control. This means that public valuations and capital flows may carry deeply symbolic weight for corporate leaders.

My research suggests that people at the highest levels of wealth and power have deeply complex emotional relationships with money – but the field of financial therapy has largely overlooked them. This isn’t an accident. It reflects a broader assumption that wealth insulates people from psychological distress. In reality, emotional entanglements can intensify with greater wealth and power – and research suggests that men, in particular, face distinct challenges. True inclusion in financial therapy means recognizing and responding to these needs.

When distress becomes a leadership crisis

In a 2023 study – When and why do men negotiate assertively? – Jens Mazei, whose research focuses on negotiations and conflict management, and his colleagues found that men become more aggressive in negotiations when they think their masculinity is being threatened. This was especially true in contexts viewed as “masculine,” such as salary negotiations. In “nonmasculine” contexts, such as negotiations over flexible work and child care benefits, participants weren’t significantly more aggressive when their masculinity was challenged.

On male-coded topics, many men in the study reinforced gender norms by rejecting compromise, using hardball tactics or even inflating financial demands to reassert their masculinity. These behaviors reflect an unconscious need to restore a sense of masculine identity, the researchers suggest. If this reaction occurs in salary negotiations, how might it manifest when the stakes are exponentially higher?

Emerging research in organizational psychology shows that financial stress is linked to abusive supervision, particularly among men who feel a loss of control. Further, traits such as CEO masculinity have been linked with increased risk-taking, while female CEOs tend to reduce risk. Together, these findings point to a dangerous intersection of psychological stress, masculinity and executive decision-making.

M&A as a masculinity battleground

Financial distress doesn’t always look like bankruptcy or bad credit. Among powerful men, it can manifest as overconfidence, rigidity or aggression – and it can sometimes lead to very uneconomical outcomes.

Consider the research on M&A. Most mergers and acquisitions are value killers – in other words, they destroy more economic value than they create – and the field of M&A is deeply male. These two facts suggest that some mergers are driven more by threatened masculinity than by strategic logic. If men become more aggressive in negotiations when their masculinity is threatened, then CEOs and corporate leaders, who are overwhelmingly male, may react similarly when their companies, and by extension their leadership, are challenged.

Target companies rarely take a passive approach to acquisition attempts. Instead, they deploy defensive measures such as poison pills, golden parachutes, staggered boards and scorched-earth tactics. In addition to serving financial goals, these may also act as symbolic defenses of masculine authority.

Mergers and acquisitions, by their nature, create a contest of power between dominant figures. The very language of M&A – for example, “raiders,” “hostile takeovers,” “defenses” and “white knights” – is combative. This reinforces an environment where corporate leaders may view acquisition attempts as challenges to their authority rather than as just financial transactions.

A growing body of behavioral-strategy research confirms that boardroom decisions are often shaped by emotional undercurrents rather than purely rational analysis. While this research stops short of naming it, the dynamics it describes align closely with what Mazei and colleagues call “masculinity threat.”

This has direct implications for corporate M&A. The overwhelming majority of top CEOs are men, and the language of M&A often evokes siege, power struggles and conquest. In such a symbolic arena, acquisition attempts can trigger deep, emotionally charged responses, as the identity stakes are high. What appear to be strategic financial decisions may actually be reflexive defenses of masculine authority.

On a related note, researchers in behavioral finance have long studied the “endowment effect,” or the tendency for people to value assets more simply because they own them. While the endowment effect has been studied primarily among retail investors making ordinary financial decisions, it could be particularly important for corporate executives and billionaires, who have more to lose.

When combined with threatened masculinity, the endowment effect can produce combustible reactions to declining valuations, missed earnings or takeover bids – even for individuals who remain vastly wealthy after marginal losses. While the research at this intersection is still emerging, the underlying behavioral patterns are well established.

What does financial therapy for the ultrarich look like?

Financial therapy for high-net-worth individuals rarely looks like sitting on a couch discussing childhood trauma. Instead, it takes an interdisciplinary approach involving financial advisers, therapists and sometimes executive coaches. Sessions tend to focus on legacy planning, control issues, guilt over wealth, or strained family relationships.

Many high-net-worth men display behaviors that don’t look like like stereotypical “financial distress.” These can include compulsive deal-making, emotionally driven investment decisions, workaholism and difficulty trusting advisers. In some cases, unresolved financial trauma shows up as chronic dissatisfaction and the sense that no achievement, acquisition or net worth is ever “enough.”

While financial therapy is intended to help individuals, I think it could actually be a tool for global economic stability.

After all, when masculinity is threatened in corporate decision-making, the consequences can extend far beyond the boardroom. These actions can destabilize industries, fuel economic downturns and disrupt entire labor markets. Unchecked financial anxiety among corporate elites and billionaires isn’t just their own problem – it can cascade and become everyone’s problem.

From this perspective, financial therapy isn’t just a personal good. It’s a structural necessity that can prevent unchecked financial distress from driving destructive corporate decisions and broader economic disruptions.

If financial therapy helps people navigate financial distress and make healthier money decisions, then no group needs it more than male corporate leaders and billionaires.

Prince Sarpong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why male corporate leaders and billionaires may need financial therapy more than anyone – https://theconversation.com/why-male-corporate-leaders-and-billionaires-may-need-financial-therapy-more-than-anyone-252094

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Joshua Boston, Associate Professor of Political Science, Bowling Green State University

The U.S. Supreme Court has always ruled on politically controversial issues. From elections to civil rights, from abortion to free speech, the justices frequently weigh in on the country’s most debated problems.

And because of the court’s influence over national policy, political parties and interest groups battle fiercely over who gets appointed to the high court.

The public typically finds out about the court – including its significant decisions and the politics surrounding appointments – from the news media. While elected officeholders and candidates make direct appeals to their voters, the justices and Supreme Court nominees are different – they largely rely on the news to disseminate information about the court, giving the public at least a cursory understanding.

Recently, something has changed in newspaper coverage of the Supreme Court. As scholars of judicial politics, political institutions and political behavior, we set out to understand precisely how media coverage of the court has changed over the past 40 years. Specifically, we analyzed the content of every article referencing the Supreme Court in five major newspapers from 1980 to 2023.

Of course, people get their news from a variety of sources, but we have no reason to believe the trends we uncovered in our research of traditional newspapers do not apply broadly. Research indicates that alternative media sources largely follow the lead of traditional beat reporters.

What we found: Politics has a much stronger presence in articles today than in years past, with a notable increase beginning in 2016.

When public goodwill prevailed

Not many cases have been more important in the past quarter-century or, from a partisan perspective, more contentious than Bush v. Gore – the December 2000 ruling that stopped a ballot recount, resulting in then-Texas Governor George W. Bush defeating Democratic candidate Al Gore and winning the presidential election.

Bush v. Gore is particularly interesting to us because nine unelected, life-tenured justices functionally decided an election.

Surprisingly, the court’s public support didn’t suffer, ostensibly because the court had built up a sufficient store of public goodwill.

One reason public support remained steady following Bush v. Gore might be newspaper coverage. Although the court’s decision reflected the justices’ ideologies, with the more conservative members effectively voting to end the recount and its more liberal members voting in favor of the recount, newspapers largely ignored the role of politics in the decision.

For example, the New York Times case coverage indicated the justices’ names and their votes but mentioned neither the party of the president who appointed them nor their ideological leanings. The words “Democrat,” “Republican,” “liberal” and “conservative” – what we call political frames – do not appear in the Dec. 13, 2000, story about the decision.

This epitomizes court-related newspaper articles from the 1980s to the early 2000s, when reporters treated the court as a nonpolitical institution. According to our research, court-related news articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal hardly used political frames during that time.

Instead, newspapers perpetuated a dominant belief among the public that Supreme Court decisions were based almost completely on legal principles rather than political preferences. This belief, in turn, bolstered support for the court.

Recent newspaper coverage reveals a starkly different pattern.

A contemporary political court

It would be nearly impossible to read contemporary articles about the Supreme Court without getting the impression that it is just as political as Congress and the presidency.

Analyzing our data from 1980 to 2023, the average number of political frames per article tripled. To be sure, politics has always played a role in the court’s decisions. Now, newspapers are making that clear. The question is when this change occurred.

Across the five major newspapers, reporting about the court has gradually become more political over time. That isn’t surprising: America has been gradually polarizing since the 1980s as well, and the changes in news media coverage reflect that polarization.

Take February of 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died. Of course, justices have died while serving on the court before. But Scalia was a conservative icon, and his death could have swung the court to the center or the left.

How the politics of naming his successor played out after Scalia’s death was unprecedented.

President Barack Obama’s nomination effort to put Merrick Garland on the court were stonewalled. The Senate majority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the Senate would not consider any nomination until after the presidential election, nine months from Scalia’s death.

Republican candidate Donald Trump, seeing an opening, promised to fill the vacancy with a conservative justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade. The court and the 2016 election became inseparable.

Scalia vacancy changed everything

February 2016 brought about an abrupt and lasting change in newspaper coverage. The day before Scalia’s death, a typical article referencing the court used 3.22 political frames.

The day after, 10.48.

We see an uptick in political frames if we consider annual changes as well. In 2015, newspapers averaged 3.50 political frames per article about the Supreme Court. Then, in 2016, 5.30.

Using a variety of statistical methods to identify enduring framing shifts, we consistently find February 2016 as the moment newspapers shifted to higher levels of political framing of the court. We find the number of political frames in newspapers remained elevated through 2023.

How stories frame something shapes how people think about it.

If an article frames a court decision as “originalist” – an analytical approach that says constitutional texts should be interpreted as they were understood at the time they became law – then readers might think of the court as legalistic.

But if the newspaper were to frame the decision as “conservative,” then readers might think of the court as ideological.

We found in our study that when people read an article about a court decision using political frames, court approval declines. That’s because most people desire a legal court rather than a political one. No wonder polls today find the court with precariously low public support.

We do not necessarily hold journalists responsible for the court’s dramatic decline in public support. The bigger issue may be the court rather than reporters. If the court acts politically, and the justices behave ideologically, then reporters are doing their job: writing accurate stories.

That poses yet another problem. Before Trump’s three court appointments, the bench was known for its relative balance. Sometimes decisions were liberal; other times, conservative.

In June 2013, the court provided protections to same-sex marriages. Two days earlier, the court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act. A liberal win, a conservative win – that’s what we might expect from a legal institution.

Today the court is different. For most salient issues, the court supports conservative policies.

Given, first, the media’s willingness to emphasize the court’s politics, and second, the justices’ ideologically consistent decisions across critical issues, it is unlikely that the news media retreats from political framing anytime soon.

If that’s the case, the court may need to adjust to its low public approval.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Supreme Court news coverage has talked a lot more about politics ever since the 2016 death of Scalia and GOP blocking of Obama’s proposed nominee – https://theconversation.com/supreme-court-news-coverage-has-talked-a-lot-more-about-politics-ever-since-the-2016-death-of-scalia-and-gop-blocking-of-obamas-proposed-nominee-259120

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Amanda Kay Montoya, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

Back in high school chemistry, I remember waiting with my bench partner for crystals to form on our stick in the cup of blue solution. Other groups around us jumped with joy when their crystals formed, but my group just waited. When the bell rang, everyone left but me. My teacher came over, picked up an unopened bag on the counter and told me, “Crystals can’t grow if the salt is not in the solution.”

To me, this was how science worked: What you expect to happen is clear and concrete. And if it doesn’t happen, you’ve done something wrong.

If only it were that simple.

It took me many years to realize that science is not just some series of activities where you know what will happen at the end. Instead, science is about discovering and generating new knowledge.

Now, I’m a psychologist studying how scientists do science. How do new methods and tools get adopted? How do changes happen in scientific fields, and what hinders changes in the way we do science?

One practice that has fascinated me for many years is replication research, where a research group tries to redo a previous study. Like with the crystals, getting the same result from different teams doesn’t always happen, and when you’re on the team whose crystals don’t grow, you don’t know if the study didn’t work because the theory is wrong, or whether you forgot to put the salt in the solution.

The replication crisis

A May 2025 executive order by President Donald Trump emphasized the “reproducibility crisis” in science. While replicability and reproducibility may sound similar, they’re distinct.

Reproducibility is the ability to use the same data and methods from a study and reproduce the result. In my editorial role at the journal Psychological Science, I conduct computational reproducibility checks where we take the reported data and check that all the results in the paper can be reproduced independently.

But we’re not running the study over again, or collecting new data. While reproducibility is important, research that is incorrect, fallible and sometimes harmful can still be reproducible.

By contrast, replication is when an independent team repeats the same process, including collecting new data, to see if they get the same results. When research replicates, the team can be more confident that the results are not a fluke or an error.

The “replication crisis,” a term coined in psychology in the early 2010s, has spread to many fields, including biology, economics, medicine and computer science. Failures to replicate high-profile studies concern many scientists in these fields.

Why replicate?

Replicability is a core scientific value: Researchers want to be able to find the same result again and again. Many important findings are not published until they are independently replicated.

In research, chance findings can occur. Imagine if one person flipped a coin 10 times and got two heads, then told the world that “coins have a 20% chance of coming up heads.” Even though this is an unlikely outcome – about 4% – it’s possible.

Replications can correct these chance outcomes, as well as scientific errors, to ensure science is self-correcting.

For example, in the search for the Higgs boson, two research centers at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, ATLAS and CMS, independently replicated the detection of a particle with a large unique mass, leading to the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.

The initial measurements from the two centers actually estimated the mass of the particle as slightly different. So while the two centers didn’t find identical results, the teams evaluated them and determined they were close enough. This variability is a natural part of the scientific process. Just because results are not identical does not mean they are not reliable.

Research centers like CERN have replication built into their process, but this is not feasible for all research. For projects that are relatively low cost, the original team will often replicate their work prior to publication – but doing so does not guarantee that an independent team could get the same results.

When projects are costly, urgent or time-specific, independently replicating them prior to disseminating results is often not feasible. Remember when people across the country were waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine?

The initial Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine took 13 months from the start of the trial to authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. The results of the initial study were so clear and convincing that a replication would have unnecessarily delayed getting the vaccine out to the public and slowing the spread of disease.

Since not every study can be replicated prior to publication, it’s important to conduct replications after studies are published. Replications help scientists understand how well research processes are working, identify errors and self-correct. So what’s the process of conducting a replication?

The replication process

Researchers could independently replicate the work of other teams, like at CERN. And that does happen. But when there are only two studies – the original and the replication – it’s hard to know what to do when they disagree. For that reason, large multigroup teams often conduct replications where they are all replicating the same study.

Alternatively, if the purpose is to estimate the replicability of a body of research – for example, cancer biology – each team might replicate a different study, and the focus is on the percentage of studies that replicate across many studies.

These large-scale replication projects have arisen around the world and include ManyLabs, ManyBabies, Psychological Accelerator and others.

Replicators start by learning as much as possible about how the original study was conducted. They can collect details about the study from reading the published paper, discussing the work with its original authors and consulting online materials.

The replicators want to know how the participants were recruited, how the data was collected and using what tools, and how the data was analyzed.

But sometimes, studies may leave out important details, like the questions participants were asked or the brand of equipment used. Replicators have to make these difficult decisions themselves, which can affect the outcome.

Replicators also often explicitly change details of the study. For example, many replication studies are conducted with larger samples – more participants – than the original study, to ensure the results are reliable.

Registration and publication

Sadly, replication research is hard to publish: Only 3% of papers in psychology, less than 1% in education and 1.2% in marketing are replications.

If the original study replicates, journals may reject the paper because there is no “new insight.” If it doesn’t replicate, journals may reject the paper because they assume the replicators made a mistake – remember the salt crystals.

Because of these issues, replicators often use registration to strengthen their claims. A preregistration is a public document describing the plan for the study. It is time-stamped to before the study is conducted.

This type of document improves transparency by making changes in the plan detectable to reviewers. Registered reports take this a step further, where the research plan is subject to peer review before conducting the study.

If the journal approves the registration, they commit to publishing the results of the study regardless of the results. Registered reports are ideal for replication research because the reviewers don’t know the results when the journal commits to publishing the paper, and whether the study replicates or not won’t affect whether it gets published.

About 58% of registered reports in psychology are replication studies.

Replication research often uses the highest standards of research practice: large samples and registration. While not all replication research is required to use these practices, those that do contribute greatly to our confidence in scientific results.

Replication research is a useful thermometer to understand if scientific processes are working as intended. Active discussion of the replicability crisis, in both scientific and political spaces, suggests to many researchers that there is room for growth. While no field would expect a replication rate of 100%, new processes among scientists aim to improve the rates from those in the past.

Amanda Kay Montoya is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Open Science. She receives funding from the US-National Science Foundation.

– ref. Research replication can determine how well science is working – but how do scientists replicate studies? – https://theconversation.com/research-replication-can-determine-how-well-science-is-working-but-how-do-scientists-replicate-studies-260771