Looking at the central role emotion and uncertainty play in financial decision-making and behaviour for finance professionals and the wider public
Early to bed and early to rise will make you healthy, wealthy and wiseFolk proverb Are the kinds of habits and behaviours that make you wealthy hard-wired as part of your personality? In a large study of UK adults Adrian Furnham and I looked at the role of personality in wealth accumulation. Our results suggest… Continue reading Personality and wealth
"You don't get rich by what you earn. You get rich by what you don't spend." (Henry Ford) Why are some people wealthier and better off than others? Given similar income levels, what predicts who will build greater wealth? Why are people of the same age and similar background factors so different in their wealth… Continue reading Can your habits and attitudes make you wealthy?
As a mathematician and a psychologist from a network studying real-world decision-making under radical uncertainty, we work on the dangers of investing scientific models with phantastic (wished-for but unrealistic) power to resolve uncertainty and produce optimal solutions. In this short blog we discuss the dangers of forgetting that, in the context of uncertainty, successful anticipatory thinking is not about making good predictions, it is about agility when judging what information to gather to grasp an unfolding landscape, and constant curiosity about what might be left out. Algorithms - and humans masquerading as algorithms, or passing the buck to algorithms - are fragile decision-makers under many real-life conditions.
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."Werner Heisenberg (1) Social facts reduce our experience of uncertainty “Adam's commission, the naming of things, if only in the imagination, brings them into existence, objects of thought; like God, breathes into them the power of the word."The naming of things,… Continue reading The need for constructive ambivalence during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The stories we tell ourselves about futures and the impact of our actions in them are important acts of imagination which enable us to act, despite uncertainty. However, they can also become over-comfortable refuges from the anxiety provoked by uncertainty and a route to disregarding important information and perspectives which challenge our certainties.
Myself and Jacqui Gabb discuss the importance of money and emotions in relationships.
In the video in this blog I discuss with the MoneyMail's Rachel Rickard Straus the psychology of advertising, impulsive spending and self control.
“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” —Ursula K. LeGuin To listen to some scholars of decision-making, it is a great wonder that humans have survived as long as they have. We are constantly prone to biases, rely on simplistic… Continue reading Different Minds: why we need human capabilities and machine intelligence*
Successful fraud requires both a set of skills and a willingness to deliberately target and deceive others. The most successful fraudsters have a capacity to look us in the eye, to engage our trust and then betray it without a qualm. This capacity is actually quite rare and often associated with personality disorder (or perhaps… Continue reading Scams, Victims, and Scammers
"Money doesn't talk it swears" Bob Dylan Differences in attitudes to money are a major cause of disagreements in relationships. Research shows that financial disagreements are one of the more frequent and less easily resolved causes of relationship conflict. One study found that whilst people are often attracted to potential partners with different emotional reactions to spending, that… Continue reading Money and relationships
Let’s call him James, a trader in a City investment bank; young, smartly dressed, confident, and a little impatient. He sat across from me in the interview: “It’s really important to stay cool. For myself, I can say that I really don’t have much emotion while I trade”. Half an hour later, as he relaxed… Continue reading ‘The heart has its reasons’: emotions and cognition in the world of finance
Emotional Finance 