How To Master Mental Accounting

摘要

Spending too much on your credit card? Try freezing it -literally. Drop it in a glass of water and put it in the freezer, then when you get the urge to splurge you will have to let the ice thaw, by which time your sanity should have prevailed. According to Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago, tricks like this are a useful way to counter our brain's irrational financial tendencies. These arise, Thaler believes, because our psychological biases cause us to put money into different "mental accounts" and to think of the contents of each in a different way.