COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY AS NA INTERVENTION PROPOSAL FOR DYSFUNCTIONAL FINANCIAL BEHAVIORS

Abstract

The over-indebtedness of consumers has become a relevant social phenomenon due to its severity and growth. Many countries already have specific legislation for treating it, but there is still a need for the articulation of scientific knowledge produced in different disciplines for its understanding. Although troubled financial behaviors permeate our culture, the field of psychology is not yet in line with this reality. Dysfunctional financial behavior is understood as the way of dealing with financial resources, the consequences of which being harmful, but which persist nonetheless. According to some authors, among them Kahneman (2012), this dysfunctionality persists, even yielding losses, because the individual would be acting, most of the time, in his automatic mode. The purpose of this study was to produce a narrative review of publications made between the years 2000 to 2018 to understand the problem of indebtedness from how economic psychology and behavioral economics deal with deficiencies in decision-making due to cognitive errors and, thus, evaluate whether CBT would present intervention tools that would be effective in this type of behavioral dysfunction. It was possible to verify that yes: CBT can offer subsidies for the development of more functional financial behaviors. According to the conducted study, this dysfunctionality is, in most cases, caused by cognitive distortions, which leads to the conclusion that cognitive restructuring, which is the ultimate goal of CBT, may be a viable intervention.