Special Issue: Psychology in the Economic World

Abstract

Applied psychology follows the premise to use psychological theories in order to develop strategies to overcome problems in various areas of everyday life, such as mental health and disease, education, politics and law, or business management. It includes the areas of clinical psychology, work and organisational psychology, forensic psychology, as well as many other areas such as sports psychology, school psychology, or community psychology. A vast applied psychological literature on work and business organisations has accumulated, spanning research on personnel selection, training, motivation and job satisfaction, leadership, organisational decision-making and change, job design and safety, etc. Yet, research on consumer behavior and national economics is rather scarce in applied psychology, despite repeated endeavors to establish a field of research joining economics and psychology. Indeed, only in 1999 a special issue of Applied Psychology: An International Review, edited by Fred van Raaij, was dedicated to Economic Psychology with the aim of giving an overall impression of this branch of applied psychology. At that time, the special issue was dedicated to introducing economic psychology with papers on consumer socialisation and on consumer decision-making, on the role of macroeconomic psychology, as well as on socioeconomic preferences in a period of political system transformation. The present special issue is dedicated to the relevance of psychology in the economic world. The basic premise is to present a selection of topics originating from economic psychology and to inform a wide community about this field of applied psychology, which is represented by Division 9 of IAAP. In this issue, eight articles, representing various topics studied in economic