Singletary: Picturing financial behaviors

I learned that if I didn’t address the fear and behaviors behind people’s financial decisions, I couldn’t get them to make lifelong changes to become better stewards of their money.

I tell you all this as an introduction to this month’s Color of Money Book Club selection. It’s an out-of-the-box choice. In fact, I’m not choosing a book this time. Instead, I want you to watch a documentary that provides some of the “why” behind your financial choices.

The documentary is “Thinking Money: The Psychology Behind Our Best and Worst Financial Decisions,” hosted by actor Dave Coyne. Make it a family affair. You can stream the film by going to video.mpt.tv/video/2365353075/. Or order a free DVD by going to saveandinvest.org. There’s a link on the home page for the documentary. Or search local public television stations to see when the program is airing.

“Classical economics assumes we’re all rational consumers making logical choices based on the best financial information,” Coyne says at the beginning of the film. “But behavioral economics adds psychology and an understanding of human nature to the mix, recognizing us as emotional, even irrational human beings.”

The documentary, which was produced by Rocket Media Group in association with the FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) Investor Education Foundation and Maryland Public Television, covers quite a bit of research that delves into people’s financial behaviors.

In one experiment, price made a big impression on people’s brains. Volunteers were served wine through a tube, while lying inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine, or MRI. As they were served, they were told the price point of each wine, while the MRI measured real-time changes to blood flow in their brains. They were told one serving of wine cost $90 and the other $10. Brain scans found people enjoyed the expensive wine more.

What the volunteers didn’t know was both samples were the same $10 wine.

So what does wine tasting have to do with saving?

“The other way to think about it is that if you spend, you get more pleasure than if you save because if you think about it in the overall scheme of things, saving for most people is boring,” says Baba Shiv, who helped conduct the wine experiment and who is a neuroeconomist and professor of marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

And how can we trick people’s brains to feel happy about saving?

“The only long-term solution … is to make saving more sexy for the brain,” Shiv says.

The documentary also explores why too many choices can paralyze consumers. There’s a great segment with an expert in consumer and investment fraud who talks about the tactics con artists use and the psychology of fraud victims.

I most loved the segment in which Coyne puts on goggles and sees an age-progressed image of himself. In one study, volunteers did the same thing. They were then quizzed about how they would like to spend or save their money, including putting funds into a retirement plan. Researchers found that people who saw images of their future selves put about twice as much money into the retirement fund.

“The more connected people felt to their future selves on a natural level, the better they were at saving,” Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor of marketing at UCLA’s School of Management, says in the film.

Do your future self a favor and watch this documentary. And then work on getting rid of your financial fears and tricking your brain into saving more and spending less.

Michelle Singletary welcomes comments and column ideas. Reach her in care of The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071; or singletarym@washpost.com.