Professor of Behavioral Science & Marketing · UC San Diego
What people do with money, not what they say they do.
I study financial decision-making using millions of real bank transactions and large-scale psychological data — the gap between how people think they handle money and how they actually handle it.
Read the research
Rady School of Management
About
Fit, not amount
Two people on the same salary can feel completely differently about money, and the difference is rarely the amount. It is fit — whether a financial life suits the person living it.
The clearest evidence comes from spending. In 76,000 bank transaction records, people whose purchases matched their personality were more satisfied with their lives — and that fit predicted happiness better than income or total spending did. Savings goals work the same way: people save more when the goal suits their temperament rather than someone else’s idea of a sensible plan.
This is why I am sceptical of universal financial advice. The same trait rescues one person and sinks another. Agreeable people end up worse off financially, but only when they start out poor. Optimism helps everyone save, and helps the lowest earners most. Feeling short of money drives high earners to spend more and low earners to spend less — the identical feeling, producing opposite behaviour.
I work mainly with bank transaction records, tens of millions of them, matched to psychological data about the people making the payments. Statements record what people did rather than what they remember doing, and the two are rarely the same.
I grew up in Brighton, a seaside town on England’s south coast, and trained at Exeter, Oxford and Cambridge before moving to the United States. I now teach at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management, after faculty positions at University College London and Colorado Boulder, where I co-directed the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making. My research appears in journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research and Psychological Science; I was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Finance, and am a regular guest on BBC World News, with work profiled in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Time.
Outside work I play dodgeball in a San Diego social league and listen to a lot of history podcasts.
Areas of research
Three questions I keep returning to
Personality
Spending and Personality
What transaction records reveal about who someone is, and why spending in line with your personality pays off in wellbeing.
Explore the work →Wellbeing
Money and Wellbeing
Income and wealth predict how people feel less well than most assume. The shape of a financial life matters more than its size.
Explore the work →Households
Couples and Household Finance
Who manages the money, what happens when they stop, and how financial arrangements shape relationships.
Explore the work →Publications