How smartphones could be gumming up survey data.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

According to surveys by the FINRA Foundation,

our knowledge of personal finance here in the U.S.

went down by 15% between 2009 and 2021.

But what if it actually didn't?

What if the technology we used to answer the questions is now getting in the way?

In 2021, over half of all respondents used a smartphone to fill out the survey. In 2009,

none of them used one. A new working paper finds that when people use smartphones for surveys,

they're more likely to respond with the wrong answer, or say, they don't know. Montana State

University economics professor Carly Urban is one of the authors of the paper.

I asked her, what made her decide to look into this in the first place?

That first statistic that you just talked about where there's been this 15% drop in financial

knowledge from 2009 to 2021, despite financial education efforts really increasing over the same

time period, was super puzzling. And I probably

got a question about, you know, why is financial literacy declining in the U.S. maybe like every other

week? I was really, really curious as to why. And I had thrown like everything at the fire

trying to understand what was doing this. And I have a now co-author on the paper,

Olivia Valdez, who's an experimental psychologist. And she came up with this thought of,

you know, maybe it's just that people are using their phone. And they're really not paying

attention. And we were like, huh, I wonder if that could be the thing that's really driving this knowledge decline.

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