Eldar Shafir

Eldar Shafir is an award-winning professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. He is best known for his innovative and exciting research into poverty, mental stresses, and financial needs. His research has greatly increased our understanding of how poverty affects individuals’ ability to make decisions and make financial decisions in particular.

Shafir has been studying the effects of poverty since the late 1980s. He was one of the first experts to investigate the idea that poverty affects the cognitive processes of decision making. His research helped prove a strong link between poverty and the inability to make decisions. He found that poverty is not simply a financial problem – it is also a cognitive problem.

In the last decade, Shafir has become well-known for his work on mental accounting. This is the idea that how we think about money and how we make financial decisions affects the outcomes of those decisions. Mental accounting is the process of creating distinct categories of factors and dividing them into those that influence our decisions and those that don’t. He has written extensively about this topic in such works as Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013) and Thinking, Fast and Slow (2015).

One of Shafir’s most famous works is The Behavioral Foundations of Economic Choice (2018). He outlines how poverty forces individuals to take seemingly irrational decisions that may result in financial disaster. He demonstrates how mental accounting affects decision-making, from impulse purchases to gambling to financial aid. By highlighting the cognitive consequences of poverty, Shafir’s work has helped shift the focus of economic decision-making away from pure financial considerations.

The other major focus of Shafir’s work is financial decision-making. He has written extensively about how individuals perceive and use money, making it one of the foundations of what makes us human. His research has also revealed how we can more effectively make decisions in order to become more successful in our finances. From making the right decisions when faced with difficult choices to utilizing banks to maximize interest and achieve financial independence, Shafir’s work focuses on ways to help us become financially secure.

In addition to his research, Shafir has also contributed to several books and edited several anthologies. He is a Guggenheim fellow, has received numerous awards, and won the prestigious Balzan Prize for Research in Behavioral Decision Making. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and has a Bachelor of Arts from Princeton and a PhD from Stanford.

Eldar Shafir’s work has pushed the boundaries of economic and social thought for the better. By exploring poverty and financial decision-making, he has made significant contributions to our understanding of how individuals make decisions. His research is inspiring and has helped to create solutions to alleviate the effects of poverty and increase financial security.