“One in three people would rather deep clean their bathroom – deep clean with rubber gloves and everything – rather than check their savings,” according to AJ Coyne, chief marketing officer at online bank Monzo. While this might sound like marketing hyperbole, it reflects a profound truth about our relationship with financial information: many of us actively avoid looking at our bank balances when we fear bad news.
This trait is so common that behavioural economists have given it a name: the “ostrich effect”. Like the myth of ostriches burying their heads in the sand, we often prefer uncertainty to confronting potentially negative financial information.
