Money & Behaviour

Impulse buying is not a character flaw. It is the predictable result of systems designed by sophisticated marketing and user experience teams to produce exactly … Read more

Does money buy happiness? The research has evolved significantly over the past decade. The honest answer is more nuanced — and more useful — than either ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Financial advice relies heavily on willpower — spend less, save more, resist temptation. But willpower is limited, depletes with use, and is a genuinely unreliable foundation for sustained financial behaviour. Here’s what works instead.

Most people set financial goals that sound right but fail predictably. The research on goal setting and behaviour change reveals why — and what specifically makes financial goals durable rather than aspirational.

‘I’m not a money person.’ ‘I’ve always been bad with finances.’ These identity statements are more than descriptions — they’re self-fulfilling predictions. Here’s how financial identity forms, what it does to behaviour, and how to change it.

Humans are social animals who infer information from others’ behaviour. In financial markets, this herding instinct drives bubbles, crashes, and individual investor underperformance. Here’s how it works and how to resist it.

People procrastinate on financial tasks more than almost any other category of decision. The reasons go deeper than laziness — and the fixes are more specific than ‘just do it’. Here’s what the research shows.

Money is the most common source of conflict in relationships — not because couples disagree about money specifically, but because money is the surface on … Read more

People place disproportionately high value on things they’ve personally assembled or created — even when those things are objectively inferior to comparable alternatives. The IKEA effect shows up in investing, business decisions, and financial planning in ways worth knowing.

People consistently believe they’ve changed a lot in the past but will change very little in the future. This illusion leads to financial decisions that don’t account for how different our preferences, values, and circumstances will be — with real costs.