Some studies have identified certain personality predictors of consumers'
investment intentions in cryptocurrency and crowdfunding, respectively. For
example, consumers with "crypto cravings" have been shown to score lower in
the Big Five personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness (Honold
& Oh, 2025), while higher in openness (Nyhus et al., 2024; for a review, see
Frank et al., 2024). In contrast, people who successfully engage in
crowdfunding initiatives appear to be associated with higher conscientiousness
(Bernardo & Santos, 2016) and lower openness scores (Isaak et al., 2021),
although the literature is inconclusive (for a review, see Neuhaus et al., 2022).
In the current research, we start in the opposite direction, testing whether
consumers' investment intentions in any of these alternative finance formats
might predict personality indicators related to agency (i.e., "More public tasks
should be carried out by private companies") and communion (i.e., "The
problems of developing countries concern us all"). Based on a large, nationally
representative sample of the adult Norwegian population (N > 2,000), we find
converging evidence for the notion that crypto consumers are agentic rather than
communal, whereas crowdfunding consumers are communal rather than
agentic, even after controlling for their scores on the Big Five personality traits
and numerous demographic variables. At the general level, we identify only a
moderate relationship between consumers' investment intentions in
cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding initiatives (r = .30, p < .001), with 11
(cryptocurrencies) to 12 (crowdfunding) percent of the sample seeing these
alternative finance formats as feasible investment options. We plan to draw on
these results in the development of another well-powered replication study
using more psychometrically sound measurements of agency and communion.
The findings from this latter study will be presented at the conference.