Despite the very long history of research on heritable traits, we still know very little about genetic effects on judgment and choice, including consumer decision making. Building on recent advances in epigenetics, we hypothesize that people inherit a general prudence tendency, which affects...

Why are people often uncomfortable dealing with financial decisions? We propose that people perceive financial decisions – more so than decisions in many other equally complex and important domains – as compatible with a cold, analytical mode of thinking and as incompatible with feelings and...