Mitigating Visual Bias and Misinformation in Digital Finance: The Role of Nudges, Literacies, and Cognitive Abilities
As investment decisions increasingly take place through digital platforms, consumers must navigate large amounts of visual information. Over the past two decades, the financial services landscape has undergone a profound transformation, with digital services increasingly relying on graphs, dashboards, and AI-supported interfaces to communicate information about investments and financial products. While these tools can facilitate access to financial information and support informed decision-making, they may also expose users to cognitive biases and consequently lead to suboptimal financial outcomes.
Against this backdrop, the Chair of Business and Economics Education – Design and Evaluation of Instructional Systems, together with an interdisciplinary team of academic researchers, has developed a research project aimed at mitigating cognitive biases and susceptibility to misinformation in digital financial services. Specifically, the project investigates how visual and graphical information influences financial decision-making and examines how consumers respond to potentially misleading information in digital financial environments. Furthermore, the project evaluates the effectiveness of various behavioral and interface design interventions intended to guide attention and improve the quality of financial decisions.
The project employs a randomized controlled experiment in Germany and Italy. Participants are exposed to different information environments, ranging from neutral to potentially misleading financial messages, combined with alternative interface designs. Several visual interventions, including saliency reduction, alternative data presentation formats, and warning messages, are tested for their effectiveness in reducing cognitive biases and susceptibility to misinformation. To better understand the underlying cognitive and attentional processes, the project combines survey-based measures with eye-tracking technology.
The project is expected to generate new evidence on how visual design and misinformation influence financial judgments in digital environments and how behavioural and design interventions can support more informed financial decisions. In addition, it aims to identify the individual competencies that help protect consumers against biased decisions and misleading information. The findings will provide evidence that may inform supervisory and regulatory authorities in the development of disclosure requirements and interface design standards within emerging regulatory frameworks.
Project Status
Ongoing
Project Team
- Prof. Dr. Carmela Aprea
- Dr. Matteo Robba
Cooperation partners
- Prof. Dr. Marianna Brunetti, Tor Vergata University of Rome (Italy)
- Prof. Dr. Lucrezia Fattobene, Tor Vergata University of Rome (Italy)
- Prof. Dr. Candida Bussoli, University LUM Giuseppe Degennaro (Italy)
- Prof. Dr. Paola Iannello, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano (Italy)
- Dr. Marco Barone, University LUM Giuseppe Degennaro (Italy)