Abstract
Financial education for children involves the transmission of—and contributes to modify—knowledge and behaviours in and in relation to the economic domain, in different ways at different ages. From a psychological perspective, to make financial education for young people effectively it is necessary to consider two related matters: the nature of the decision-making process and the understanding of social norms evidenced by that process’s features. Decision-making abilities can in this light be conceived as internal pre-requisites for educational interventions, and social norms as external constraints defining the contexts in which decisions are taken. After a brief overview of the main models of financial education devised by economists and psychologists in recent years, we present a review of the development of decision-making ability during childhood, focusing on the impact of social norms for our understanding of it.
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Marchetti, A., Castelli, I., Massaro, D., Valle, A. (2016). Combining Development and Education: Why Do Decision-Making and Social Norms Matter for Financial Education?. In: Aprea, C., et al. International Handbook of Financial Literacy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0360-8_6
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