Nigel Latta
Put brain in gear before engaging your wallet
Afew years ago the people who make Mars bars noticed a big spike in sales they couldn’t explain. For a month, sales just went up. They hadn’t changed their marketing campaign, and initially they couldn’t work out what had happened.
And then they realised that was the month Nasa had landed a robot on the Red Planet.
There had been a lot of media coverage of the landing, raising an awareness of Mars among shoppers.
What I’ve learned making the Mind over Money series is that our biggest problem with money is this totally misplaced belief that we make independent, unbiased, rational decisions.
We don’t, and to be better with money, we really have to understand the tricks that our brains are going to play on us.
Brains are essentially enormously complex, but also pretty simple. There are actually a whole bunch of different systems in our brains all vying for control.
The systems which have the loudest, quickest ‘‘voice’’ tend to be the simple, primitive ones, the brain’s rewards centres and the ‘‘fight or flight’’ centres.
This helps us understand why some of us spend money we really don’t have.
When you spend money it usually feels quite nice. That’s the reward centres in your brain kicking in.
Once the emotional rush has passed through, your frontal cortex says ‘‘Hey, let’s think about this for a minute. You can’t really afford that. You’ve got these bills coming up.’’
The tendency to spend, or at the other extreme, to be a tightwad, is also about the amount of selfcontrol we possess.
Some of the knowledge that went into the show comes from the Dunedin Study, which has followed the lives of a group of people from Dunedin for more than 40 years.
The scientists have found that self-control levels predict all kinds of outcomes in life.
Some people just have less control. You can see that when they are three years old. Temperamental differences emerge very early in life.
People with less self-control will have more money problems, and more debt problems.
But the good thing is that selfcontrol is something that you can develop and learn like any other skill.
If you practice ukulele, you get better at ukulele. If you practice self-control, you get better at self-control.
It’s not easy, and it takes work, which is where most of us fall over.
For Mind over Money we created a Nudge Unit which pushes people to do the things they know they should be doing; such as leaving those doughnuts on the supermarket shelf, or selling unwanted items on Trade Me.
What the world tries to do is nudge you the other way into buying stuff all the time.
It’s up to us to put things in place to try to nudge ourselves back the other way.