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During the Greenspan‐Bernanke era, the responses of Federal Reserve officials to financial crises resulted in an extraordinary involvement of the US central bank in the non‐banking financial sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the informal and evolving conceptual framework that allows Federal Reserve officials to pursue a strategy of “constrained discretion” in responding to financial disturbances.

Behavioural economics relies on designed psychological and economic experiments to predict behavioural biases at the group level. As an analogue applicable to understanding biases in the intuitive judgments of individual policymakers, a naïve behavioural economics approach relies on intuitive or naive psychology and the interpretation of historical events as natural experiments to explain why intuitive judgments of Federal Reserve officials will contain biases.

Under the Greenspan‐Bernanke conceptual framework, Federal Reserve officials exercise “constrained discretion” in responding to disturbances arising from macro structural changes in the financial sector. The two key concepts are the Greenspan‐Bernanke doctrine on how the Federal Reserve officials respond to financial asset price bubbles and their collapses, and Bernanke's financial accelerator. Several examples are cited in which policy errors made by Alan Greenspan were attributable to identifiable biases in his intuitive judgment. In addition, Bernanke's response to the financial crisis of 2007‐2009 was based on his interpretation of the Great Depression as a natural experiment. But that interpretation was heavily biased by the influence of Milton Friedman on Bernanke's intuitive judgment. While Federal Reserve officials will need to exercise discretionary judgment in responding to financial crises, the potential for errors due to biases in that judgment can be reduced through regulatory reforms that lessen the potential for financial crises to occur.

While quantitative analyses of the effects of the Federal Reserve's actions on non‐bank financial institutions and the financial markets are ongoing, little attention has been given to the psychological aspects of the intuitive judgment that influences the discretionary decisions of the policymakers.

In a modern world increasingly perceived as uncertain, the mere purchase of a household cleaning product, or a seemingly harmless bottle of milk, conveys interrogations about potential hazards, from environmental to health impacts. The main purpose of this paper is to suggest that risk could be considered as one of the major dimensions of choice for a wide range of concerns and markets, alongside aspiration/satisfaction, and tackled efficiently by mobilizing the recent findings of cognitive sciences, neurosciences and evolutionary psychology. It is felt that consumer research could benefit more widely from psychological and evolutionary-grounded risk theories.

In this study, some 50 years of marketing management literature, as well as risk-specialized literature, was examined in an attempt to get a grasp of how risk is handled by consumer sciences and of whether they make some use of the most recent academic works on mental biases, non-mainstream decision-making processes or evolutionary roots of behavior. We then tested and formulated several hypotheses regarding risk profiles and preferences in the sector of insurance, by participating in an Axa Research Fund–Paris School of Economics research project.

It is suggested that consumer profiles could be enriched by risk-taking attitudes, that risk could be part of the “reason why” of brand positioning, and that brand, as well as public policy communication, could benefit from a targeted use of risk perception biases.

This paper proposes to apply evolutionary-based psychological concepts to build perceptual maps describing people and consumers on both aspiration and risk attitude axis, and to design communication tools according to psychological research on message framing and biases. Such an approach mobilizes not only the recent findings of cognitive sciences and neurosciences but also the understanding of the roots of risk attitudes and perception. Those maps and framing could probably be applied to many sectors, markets and public issues, from commodities to personal products and services (food, luxury goods, electronics, financial products, tourism, design or insurance).

Because belief in a supernatural agent with extraordinary power is rooted in psychology, Veblen's instinct psychology was the essential basis for his evolutionary economics of religion. The innate behavioral traits that Veblen called instincts in human nature are now recognized in evolutionary psychology as domain-specific mechanism that evolved as adaptations to enable human survival and reproduction. The authors aim to explain how the modern evolutionary psychology of religion provides a modern psychological basis for Veblen's evolutionary economics of religion.

First, the authors review how Veblen's theory of an evolved human nature of instincts was applied to explain the origins of religion in primitive societies and remained a resilient force despite evolutionary erosion of institutional religion as science advanced. Second, the authors note how evolutionary psychology explains the origins of religion in terms of the functioning of domain-specific psychological mechanisms that evolved as adaptations for purposes other than religion.

The similarities between Veblen's instinct psychology and the explanation of religion as by-products of domain-specific psychological mechanisms are sufficient to allow the conclusion that the evolutionary psychology of religion provides a modern psychological basis for Veblen's evolutionary economics of religion.

An evolutionary economics of religion has a great social value if it provides credible explanations of both the origins of religious belief and innate tendency for religious belief to continue even as science refutes elements of religious doctrines. With a modern psychological basis, Veblen's evolutionary economics of religion accomplishes that purpose.

The purpose of this paper is to lay the foundations for new ways of management and personality development by using the same way Peter Drucker developed his ideas. What was this “teaching philosophy”? Where else can it be found? Which learning phenomena are typical for this way of teaching? Can this “teaching philosophy” be replicated? Can it be applied to management in general?

The historical genetic method developed by Ernst Mach from the historical‐critical method. Using this approach the paper traces the origin of Drucker's central ideas for management in his early learning experiences. It then asks the question, in how far can these central ideas be generalized and used to develop the central ideas of Drucker (including the intuitive ones) further? The question is genetically left open, i.e. it is continually transformative.

Drucker was heavily influenced in his way of thinking by his education at a special school in Vienna. The school was organized by Eugenie Schwarzwald. Many of Drucker's ideas on personality development and his intuitive theories on psychology and learning can be traced back to that time. What was especially important for Drucker's later works was the “teaching philosophy” taught by Schwarzwald's teachers.

There is a direct link between the science teaching results for Finland in the OECD PISA study and Drucker's way of thinking. Drucker acquired an exponential way of learning, instead of a learning based on a linear model. This is what made his thoughts so challenging and ahead of his contemporaries. As the example of Finland shows, this is not a light‐tower method (i.e. a singular phenomenon without empirical evidence of its reproducibility). One can use these ideas in general for all of education and it has been used in over a dozen cases at different around the world times. It is especially valuable in management education of knowledge workers. In such a way, one can create a much more efficient and effective way of education, an “education 2.0”.

This is the first time that Drucker's ideas can be linked to the ideas of Ernst Mach and to similar types of education based on ideas of Mach, such as used in Finland. The empirical results of such methods can therefore not only be found in Drucker's autobiography as a single case, but they can be compared in much more general contexts, for instance in the large‐scale field study OECD PISA study or in Hattie's educational meta‐meta analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the knowledge about the value of intuition for organizational innovativeness and organizational factors inhibiting intuitive decision making.

The study develops and tests a theoretical model that relates intuitive and deliberate decision-making styles to organizational innovativeness, and the application of either decision-making style to organizational size and decision maker's power position in an organization. Based on a survey conducted in 2011, data from 281 organizations was analyzed applying linear regression analysis.

Intuitive and deliberate processing both relate positively to organizational innovativeness. Organizational size relates negatively to the application of an intuitive decision-making style, while power position relates positively to the application of an intuitive decision-making style.

The findings suggest that intuitive decision making is valuable for organizational innovativeness. Still, its application is suppressed if decision makers are in lower power positions or part of larger organizations.

High demands on managers’ and entrepreneurs’ information processing capabilities require them to apply their full range of cognitive capabilities (i.e. deliberative and intuitive processing). Intuitive decision making, however, still seems to be confined to those who have least reason to fear critique from others.

An ongoing debate in the field of organizational decision-making concerns the use of intuition versus analytical rationality in decision-making. For the purpose of contributing to this debate we use a rich empirical dataset built from a longitudinal study of information technology project prioritization in a large financial institution to investigate how managers make space for the use of intuition in decision-making. Our findings show that during project prioritization meetings, senior decision makers apply three different techniques: bringing-in project intangibles, co-promoting intuitive judgments, and associating intuitive judgments with shared group context, when they make space for intuition in decision processes.

Artifacts are rarely used today to visualize thoughts, insights, and ideas in strategy work. Rather, textual and verbal communication dominates. This is despite artifacts and visual representations holding many advantages as tools to create and make sense of strategy in teamwork. To advance our understanding of the benefits of visual aids in strategy work, I synthesize insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and management research. My analysis exposes distinct neurocognitive advantages concerning attention, emotion, learning, memory, intuition, and creativity from visual sense-building. These advantages increase when sense-building activities are playful and storytelling is used.

George Loewenstein, a prominent behavioral economist, recalls thatIn 1994, when Thaler, Camerer, Rabin, Prelec and I spent the year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, we had a meeting to make a kind of final decision about what to call what we were doing. Remarkably, at that time, the name behavioral economics was not yet well established. I actually advocated “psychological economics,” and Thaler was strong on behavioral economics. I'm kind of glad that he prevailed; I think it's a better, catchier, label, although it creates confusion due to association with Behaviorism. (G. Loewenstein, personal email to author, June 16, 2008)

Existing theoretical explanations about the influence of affect in the process of creating ideas (ideation) and their corresponding empirical findings are contradictory. The purpose of the present chapter is to provide new insights by providing a theoretical explanation that is able to encompass these contradictions, and to support this theoretical approach with empirical data. We draw on personality-systems-interactions (PSI) and use an experimental design to capture dynamic effects between affect and ideation. Our findings emphasize the mediating role of affect in the ideation process and the moderating role of individual action-control in the regulation of affect and respective creative behavior.