The study, conducted by Joel Mark P. Rodriguez of Rizal Technological University, surveyed 377 young professionals aged 21 to 35 who work in Makati City, home to the headquarters of many of the country’s largest banks, multinational corporations, and more than a thousand business process outsourcing offices. These workers face a uniquely demanding financial environment: high living costs, sophisticated digital financial products, and constant pressure to budget, borrow, invest, and plan for retirement in one of Southeast Asia’s most economically active urban centers. Yet despite their visibility in the economy, young urban professionals have been largely overlooked in financial well-being research, which has traditionally focused on students, households, or retirees.

To untangle how financial knowledge translates into financial security, Rodriguez anchored the study in Social Cognitive Theory, the influential framework developed by psychologist Albert Bandura, which holds that human outcomes emerge from the reciprocal interplay of personal factors, behavior, and environment. In this model, financial literacy serves as the cognitive resource, financial confidence functions as self-efficacy—the belief in one’s own ability to manage money successfully—and financial behavior represents the actual enactment of that capability through budgeting, saving, investing, and debt management. Financial well-being, measured with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s validated scale, captures the end state: a sense of security, control over current obligations, preparedness for emergencies, and freedom of choice in the present and future.

The methodological machinery behind the study was rigorous. Participants completed a structured 28-item questionnaire with seven items for each of the four constructs, rated on five-point Likert scales. The instruments were adapted from established measures, including the Financial Management Behavior Scale and the CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale, then validated through expert review, pilot testing, and exploratory factor analysis. Data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling in WarpPLS 8.0, with parallel mediation tested through bootstrapping across 5,000 resamples—an approach that estimates both mediating pathways simultaneously so that each can be evaluated while controlling for the other.

The statistical results were striking. Financial literacy exerted a significant direct effect on financial well-being (β = 0.197, p < 0.001), confirming that knowledge matters in its own right. But its effects on the two candidate mediators were far larger: literacy predicted financial behavior with a path coefficient of 0.841 and financial confidence with 0.692, both highly significant. The model explained 70.8 percent of the variance in financial behavior, 47.9 percent in financial confidence, and 68.1 percent in financial well-being, with model fit indices—including a Tenenhaus Goodness of Fit of 0.464, well above the 0.36 benchmark—indicating a robust and reliable structure.

The pivotal finding emerged when the indirect pathways were examined. Financial confidence carried a significant indirect effect of financial literacy on financial well-being (β = 0.319, p < 0.001), and its direct effect on well-being (β = 0.779, p < 0.001) was the strongest single path in the entire model. Financial behavior, by contrast, showed only a small direct effect on well-being (β = 0.107, p = 0.018), and its indirect pathway from literacy was not statistically significant (β = 0.115, p = 0.153). In other words, knowing how to manage money builds both good habits and confidence, but it is the confidence—rather than the habits—that statistically transmits the benefit of knowledge into felt financial security.

This asymmetry makes theoretical sense within Social Cognitive Theory. Confidence operates as financial self-efficacy: it motivates people to set goals, participate in markets, persist through setbacks, and actually deploy what they know. Previous research has hinted at this, with some studies finding that subjective financial knowledge—what people believe they know—correlates more strongly with financial behavior than objective knowledge does, and that confidence can sometimes influence well-being as much as or more than literacy itself. The Makati results sharpen that picture for a high-pressure urban context, where the authors suggest that good financial behavior alone may be insufficient because the sheer density of financial challenges dilutes the payoff of disciplined habits unless they are underwritten by psychological readiness.

The study also uncovered an income gradient that complicates any one-size-fits-all approach to financial education. One-way ANOVA revealed significant differences in both financial literacy (F = 6.42, p < 0.001) and financial well-being (F = 8.15, p < 0.001) across income groups, with higher earners reporting both more knowledge and greater security. Lower-income professionals, earning below 20,000 Philippine pesos monthly, face structural obstacles to converting literacy into well-being, from limited access to financial tools to fewer opportunities to leverage what they learn. The author argues that interventions should therefore be tailored: basic budgeting and savings discipline for the lowest earners, borrowing and emergency-fund strategies for the middle brackets, and investment literacy, insurance, and wealth management for those earning above 40,000 pesos.

The practical implications extend well beyond the Philippines. If confidence is the primary conduit through which knowledge becomes well-being, then financial education programs built solely around technical content—compound interest, portfolio theory, credit scores—may be missing the psychological half of the equation. The study points toward programs that incorporate financial coaching, investment simulations, and guided planning exercises designed to build self-efficacy alongside competence. It also flags a cautionary note from the broader literature: confidence is a double-edged sword, since overconfidence breeds risky decisions and losses, while underconfidence produces missed opportunities. Effective programs must calibrate belief to actual ability, ensuring that self-efficacy grows on a foundation of genuine skill rather than inflated perception.

The research has limitations that temper its reach. The sample was drawn exclusively from Makati City using purposive sampling, so results may not generalize to other Philippine cities or to neighboring ASEAN economies with different financial cultures. Some measurement properties, particularly the convergent validity of several constructs, fell below conventional thresholds, suggesting that scale refinement is needed in future work. The author recommends extending data collection to Manila, Cebu, and countries such as Singapore and Vietnam to test whether the confidence pathway holds across different urban and economic contexts. Still, the core message stands: financial literacy is necessary but not sufficient, and for young professionals navigating demanding city economies, the transformation of knowledge into security runs through the mind as much as the wallet—through the quiet, powerful conviction that one can handle whatever money throws at them.

Subject of Research: The mediating roles of financial confidence and financial behavior in the relationship between financial literacy and financial well-being among young urban professionals

Article Title: The parallel mediation effects of financial confidence and financial behavior on the relationship between financial literacy and financial well-being: evidence from young professionals

Article References: Rodriguez, J. M. P. (2026). The parallel mediation effects of financial confidence and financial behavior on the relationship between financial literacy and financial well-being: evidence from young professionals. Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 5, Article 1914751. https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2026.1914751

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frbhe.2026.1914751

Keywords: financial literacy, financial confidence, financial well-being, financial behavior, Social Cognitive Theory, young professionals, Makati City, PLS-SEM, mediation analysis, financial education, behavioral economics, self-efficacy

The theoretical foundation of the study comes from the social psychologist Serge Moscovici, who developed the Theory of Social Representations by building on Émile Durkheim’s earlier notion of collective representations. A social representation is a shared reconstruction of reality, shaped by the dominant norms, values, and ideologies of a society, and it arises through interpersonal interaction and communication. Where money attitudes describe an individual’s personal beliefs, emotions, and behavioral inclinations, social representations frame money as a social object, embedded in a constellation of relationships with saving, debt, investment, trust, and politics, and evolving over time as new events are assimilated. This distinction matters because attitudes do not form in a vacuum: they grow out of a cultural, historical, and economic framework that the collective supplies in advance.

The authors identified three gaps in the existing literature that their study was designed to fill. First, most psychological research on money has focused on attitudes rather than on the social representations that underpin them. Second, the field has relied overwhelmingly on quantitative methods with closed-ended questions, which reveal little about how specific money attitudes form in context. Third, genuinely cross-cultural and cross-national comparisons remain scarce, even though evidence shows that culture shapes how people perceive and categorize monetary resources. In many Western societies money is closely associated with autonomy and personal achievement, whereas in several Asian countries it is more often linked to relational and familial obligations, respect, and ethics. Earlier work in France by Vergès found that work and well-being anchored the representation of money, while a study in Turkey placed work in a more peripheral position, hinting at meaningful cultural variation.

Italy and the United States made an intriguing comparison because they share some cultural traits while diverging sharply on others. Both score similarly on individualism and on perceptions of power equality, yet they differ in willingness to accept uncertainty, time orientation, and indulgence. Italians tend to experience more stress and anxiety when facing unpredicted events, adapt traditions to circumstances, and encourage thrift, while Americans are more flexible in the face of challenges, focus on the present, and report higher happiness and life satisfaction. The economic backdrop also diverges: the United States has outperformed Italy in GDP growth in recent decades and recovered more strongly from the pandemic, while Italy continues to struggle with unemployment rates among the highest in Europe, trailing only Greece and Spain. The two welfare systems differ too, with Italy’s conservative-corporatist model tying benefits to employment and family support, and the American liberal model emphasizing individual responsibility and means-testing.

Methodologically, the researchers used the free association technique, the classic instrument of social representation research. Between March and May 2022 they collected data from 305 Italian participants, and by December 2022 they had gathered 515 participants in the United States, all recruited through an online panel and surveyed via Qualtrics. Each participant was asked to write up to ten words or expressions that came to mind when thinking about money, then to assign a positive, neutral, or negative valence to each one. They also completed three validated scales: the Financial Threat Scale, measuring fear and uncertainty about financial security; a Financial and General Vulnerability scale, assessing the likelihood of future hardship; and the Multidimensional Subjective Financial Well-being Scale, capturing satisfaction with one’s current financial situation. The Italian protocol was approved by an ethics committee at Università Cattolica, and the American protocol by Kansas State University’s research compliance office.

The analysis proceeded in three steps. A prototypical analysis, run with the IRAMuTeQ software, applied Abric’s Central Core theory, which holds that a social representation has a dual structure: a central core embodying its essence, and a peripheral zone reflecting individual differences and more adaptable meanings. Words were grouped semantically and plotted by frequency and mean rank of evocation, with lower ranks indicating greater salience. A correspondence analysis using the HOMALS procedure then mapped the associations in a two-dimensional space, and finally correlational analyses linked the resulting dimensions and emotional valence to the financial scales. A diversity index, computed by dividing the number of distinct terms by total occurrences, gauged the level of consensus in each sample.

The Italian results revealed a representation organized around abstract, symbolic values. The word money elicited 302 different associations with a mean valence of 0.31, and the most frequent responses were Work, cited by 21 percent of respondents, followed by Peacefulness at 16 percent, Well-being at 15 percent, Expenses at 15 percent, and Necessity at 13 percent. The prototypical structure placed Work and Well-being in the central core, with negative concepts entirely absent and only neutral terms such as Expenses, Necessity, and Cash in the periphery. The correspondence analysis produced two axes: a horizontal one contrasting an instrumental perspective, anchored by words like coins, paper money, cash, and wage, with a symbolic perspective marked by peacefulness, autonomy, freedom, and power; and a vertical one contrasting an individual dimension of daily practices such as effort, free time, saving, and investment with a universal dimension evoked by richness and poverty. Correlations showed that Italians who attributed a more positive valence to money reported less financial threat, less vulnerability, and higher subjective financial well-being.

The American picture was strikingly different in content, though structurally parallel. Money evoked 462 different associations with a higher mean valence of 0.42 and a diversity index of just 0.13, indicating strong consensus. The most frequent associations were Cash, cited by 25 percent of respondents, Necessity at 21 percent, Bills at 20 percent, Happiness at 19 percent, and Saving at 19 percent. The central core contained four elements, two tangible, Cash and Bills, and two psychological, Necessity and Happiness, while the periphery was dominated by pragmatic terms such as Saving, Paying, Salary, Funds, and Investing, with abstract words like Life, Power, and Importance relegated to the distant periphery. The correspondence analysis again yielded instrumental and symbolic poles, and individual and universal dimensions, but the overall image was of money as a practical, functional tool whose centrality to happiness is taken for granted. In the American sample, a more positive valence correlated strongly with higher subjective financial well-being and with lower perceived financial threat.

The convergence in structure alongside divergence in content is the study’s most theoretically interesting result. In both countries, money proved to be a polymorphous object, simultaneously symbolic and utilitarian, individual and universal. But the emotional center of gravity differs: Italians defend an abstract, strongly symbolic vision in which money connects to work, security, freedom, and long-term well-being, and their outlook is more ambivalent and cautious, consistent with earlier Italian studies that found negative visions of money centered on job loss, uncertainty, and fear of the future. Americans, by contrast, hold a pragmatic, positive representation in which money determines happiness, echoing prior cross-national research showing that Americans attribute more importance to money than Europeans do, and even Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in 1835 that love of wealth lies at the bottom of the actions of Americans. The authors interpret the difference as a reflection of both economic conditions, with Italian unemployment making work central to the meaning of money, and cultural values, with American individual responsibility fostering a transactional view of money as the key to immediate satisfaction.

The practical implications reach into financial education and professional practice. In Italy, the authors suggest, financial education should foster a more constructive vision of money as a tool for achieving meaningful goals, emphasizing long-term security and the link between financial habits and quality of life. In the United States, programs should encourage a shift from a transactional state of happiness toward more stable well-being, helping people recognize the risks of equating money with happiness. Across both countries, the findings argue for moving beyond basic financial literacy to address the psychological dimensions of money, using strategies such as journaling, group discussion, and values-clarification exercises, since objective knowledge alone seldom changes behavior. Financial planners and mental health practitioners alike can use these insights to surface clients’ underlying beliefs about money. The authors caution that their samples were not nationally representative and that social representations are snapshots of a precise historical moment, calling for longitudinal replications in more diverse cultural settings. Even so, the message is clear: money means different things in different places, and any policy or education that ignores those shared meanings risks missing the point entirely.

Subject of Research: Cross-national comparison of social representations of money in Italy and the United States

Article Title: Thinking About Money: Cross-national Comparison of Social Representations of “Money” in Italy and the United States

Article References: Sesini, G., Gray, B., McCoy, M., Seay, M., & Lozza, E. (2026). Thinking About Money: Cross-national Comparison of Social Representations of “Money” in Italy and the United States. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00518-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00518-7

Keywords: social representations, money psychology, economic psychology, cross-cultural comparison, Italy, United States, free association, financial well-being, money attitudes, financial education, Serge Moscovici, happiness