5 Best Books on the Psychology of Finance
A large number of factors influence how we spend, earn, and save money. Many of them increase the risk of irrationality: emotions, psychological attitudes, and habits. Psychologists and economists have long studied how we can influence a person’s financial behavior and make it more rational. Here are books on the subject.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
In this book, a not-so-ordinary economist decided to shock and simultaneously interest readers with a selection of unobvious facts from our everyday lives and their provocative treatment.
But it’s not a flamboyance for flamboyance’s sake: the authors seriously examine the economic background to various oddities, compare the incomparable, and make phenomena that no one has ever thought to study before a subject of scientific investigation.
Improving Decisions About Health, Weath, and Happiness
People make bad decisions: making bad investments, not caring about nature and natural resources, eating poor quality food, betting via 22Bet without a strategy. But many of these decisions can be prevented by a smart “choice architecture” that pushes people to make better decisions.
For example, small changes in menu design can make people eat more, the need for explicit refusal increases organ donation rates to 99% in some countries compared to 30% in others.
If you are a doctor, manager, government employee, business owner, salesperson, designer, parent, you are the architect of choice and influence others. This book is about how you can help people make better decisions.
Misbehaving. The Making of Behavioral Economics
Another Nobel laureate and behavioral economist. From his book, you can learn what psychological tricks companies use to increase sales and what factors make people make impulse purchases.
Predictably Irrational
This book is about what shapes the world economy about the motives, attitudes, and impulses that shape our economic behavior. People are used to thinking of themselves as rational beings. But Duke University professor Dan Ariely has concluded that our decisions are often predictably irrational, we act according to the same non-obvious scenarios.
The book will be of considerable help in understanding them. How do we evaluate what we have? Why, when dealing with cash, people act more honestly? How do we overpay for something that is worthless? Knowing this, you can adjust your behavior and influence the behavior of partners, customers and counterparties. The book will interest both sellers and buyers of a wide variety of goods and services, as well as anyone interested in behavioral economics.
The Why Axis
To write this book, economists infiltrated factories and offices and observed employees. They wanted to find out people’s ulterior motives and how they could be used to improve the economic situation.