In financial planning and wealth management, behavioural science has mostly been reduced to a list of biases. Anchoring. Loss aversion. Recency. The same dozen concepts, the same client examples, recycled across training programmes and conference keynotes for the better part of two decades.
It's not wrong. It's just thin.
Psyentific is a publication about everything the bias checklist misses. Here, human behaviour is treated as what it actually is: a complex interaction between the individual and the context they're in. Here, it is analysed in the depth it deserves. Here, it is translated into what actually matters for those who provide financial guidance and advice for living — not in slogans, but in something they can actually use in practice.
The bias checklist answers easy questions. The hard ones, the ones practitioners actually wrestle with, live elsewhere, and they tend to be the most interesting ones: Why does knowing what to do so rarely lead to doing it? Why does the same advice work for one person and fail for another? Why does behaviour change in one setting fail to travel to another?
These aren't bias questions. They're questions about people, in context, over time. The kind of questions Psyentific exists to take seriously.
Who this is for
If you provide financial advice for a living, as a financial planner, wealth manager, or in a similar role, and find much of the industry's account of human behaviour incomplete, Psyentific is for you. If you have ever looked at how behavioural science is applied to financial advice and thought there has to be more to this, this publication exists for that suspicion. If you measure ideas by what they help you do, not by how cleanly they fit into a framework, you are the right person, at the right moment, in exactly the right place. Welcome to Psyentific.
What you'll find here
Each piece starts from somewhere real: a case, a client conversation, a tension a practitioner has noticed but not yet named. From there, it moves through what behavioural and organisational science actually says about it, and arrives at something practical: a diagnostic worth borrowing, a principle worth carrying, a small intervention, a way of thinking about the next meeting differently. It is ideas applied to practice in the service of how advisers acquire clients, deepen relationships, navigate the difficult conversations and build the kind of practice that lasts.
Psyentific Practice is the accompanying newsletter. It's where articles arrive first, in full, in your inbox rather than wherever an algorithm decides to put them. It is also where the thinking continues between pieces — shorter observations, things worth surfacing, the occasional reframe that doesn't need a full article to land. Subscribe to read the next one.