The current financial and economic crisis is the worst since the stock‐market crash of 1929. As with every complex phenomenon, a mixture of causes have been put forward: the housing‐market bubble, risky mortgage loans, ‘toxic’ financial products, high personal and corporate debts, inaccurate credit ratings, and much more. The shockwaves have spread so rapidly and hit so hard that entire banking systems have collapsed, turning once wealthy countries into debtors that need to be saved by loans from other nations or the International Monetary Fund; Iceland being the most visible example. With such devastating effects, economists are getting their share of the blame. Why has the crisis not been foreseen by their mathematical models? If financial decisions and capital markets are driven by rational thinking, then why does the manner in which the crisis developed seem so irrational? Is there something else besides the crude analysis of numbers and facts that should be taken into account when explaining and forecasting how humans deal with money? > If financial decisions and capital markets are driven by rational thinking, then why does the manner in which the crisis developed seem so irrational? These questions have been around for some time, and both economists and biologists have put forward various responses. First was ‘behavioural economics’, which incorporates psychological and emotional factors into models of individual decision‐making. In the late 1990s, neuroeconomics emerged, spurred by the tools of neurobiology to analyse the molecular and physiological mechanisms by which decisions are made. “We define neuroeconomics as the convergence of the neural and social sciences, applied to the understanding and prediction of decisions about rewards, such as money, food, information acquisition, physical pleasure or pain, and social interactions,” wrote John Clithero and colleagues in a recent paper on the topic (Clithero et al , 2008). “Economics provides descriptive …