中国人心理账户的内隐结构

The Implicit Structure of Mental Accounting among Chinese People

“心理账户”是个人、家庭或企业集团在心理上对结果(尤其是经济结果)的记录、编码、分类和估价的心理过程,它揭示了人们进行资金(财富)决策时的内在认知编码。研究对全国9个省市1268名有效被试进行问卷调查,经过探索性因子分析、验证性因子分析以及二阶因子验证发现:中国人的心理账户系统有一个相对稳定的“3-4-2”分类结构。即收入账户有“工作相关的常规收入”、“非常规的额外收入”和“经营收入”三个账户;开支账户有“生活必需开支”、“家庭建设与个人发展开支”、“情感维系开支”和“享乐休闲开支”四个账户;存储账户有“安全型保障账户”和“风险型存储账户”两个账户。心理账户的分类研究对探究人们的经济决策行为有重要意义。

Mental accounting is a psychological process for individuals, households or corporations to code,organize, evaluate, and keep track of economic activities.It reveals the internal cognitive coding process related to people＇s economic decision - making.Kahneman, Tversky,and Thaler found that mental accounting affected the rational economic decision - making because of the non - fungibility characterization.Great progress has been made in the application of mental accounting in the past 20 years. However,the theoretical structure of mental accounting has not been fully elucidated.The purpose of this study was to reveal the theoretical structure of mental accounting in Chinese people. We developed a Chinese Implicit Structure of Mental Accounting Questionnaire Then we test it among 1268 individuals in nine cities of different provinces in China.We did exploratory factor analyses,certificated factor analyses, and second order analyses on the data. The results demonstrated that the mental accounting of Chinese showed a ＂3 - 4 - 2＂ implicit structure, with ＂3＂ representing three income accounts： regular income, management income, and windfall income, ＂4＂ representing four expense accounts： commodity expense, developmental expense, hedonic expense, and relationship expense, and ＂2＂ representing two saving accounts： security save account, and risk invest account. The present study examined further the implicit structure of mental accounting. We first found that Chinese showed a ＂3 - 4 - 2＂ implicit structure of mental accounting,This mental accounting structure model could be applied to explore individual economic decision- making, consumption behavior, saving behavior, risk investment, credit card using, human resource management,and reward motivation.