TOWARDS A MORE REALISTIC PSYCHOLOGY OF ECONOMIC SOCIALIZATION

In this paper we argue that current research into economic socialisation is unsatisfactory for two main reasons. Most researchers have tended to regard the meaning of the term 'economic' as static and given and so have taken an adult-centred view of the child's world and investigated only those domains which are obviously economic (working, spending, borrowing, saving etc.). Secondly, researchers have concentrated almost exclusively on the question of cognitive development and so have asked 'how do children come to understand the economic world of grown-ups' and not 'how do children solve the economic problems they are faced with'. We propose that researchers should be more concerned with the real economic world of childhood and we describe a few investigations that we have done in the style we favour. We conclude by discussing the implications of this approach for the future of economic psychology.