Borrow, but not Pay: Psychological Characteristics of Deviant Economic Behavior

Deviant economic behavior is considered as a variant of deviation from generally accepted norms of behavior in the economic sphere. The paper describes the results of an empirical study. The total sample was 1158 respondents, aged 18 to 82, with different experience in loans and debts. Inventories used: Author’s questionnaire for socio-demographic data and subjective economic well-being, Debt Behavior Questionnaire, Debt and Credit Tolerance/Frustration Questionnaire. Cluster analysis (k-means method) revealed four main types of debt behavior: Non-optimal blaming, Non-optimal benevolent, Optimal blaming, Optimal benevolent types. It was found that different types of debt behavior have differences in the experience of borrowing and repaying debts as well as in credit and debt tolerance and frustration. Based on the study, a forecast on the possibility of deviant debt behavior for different types is given. The most unfavorable in debt repayment is the Non-optimal blaming type. Statistics: descriptive statistics, cluster analysis, one-way ANOVA in SPSS 22.0.