Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nishant Kumar, India Alliance Fellow, National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore & Department of Biology, University of Oxford

Growing up in rural India, my grandmother would feed the village dog half a chapati and a bowl of milk each afternoon, surely insufficient for its needs. The dog survived by scavenging from nearby homes. Years later, living in Delhi, I encountered street dogs refusing biscuits, overfed by households competing to care for them.

India’s unique mix of religious and cultural values creates a deep tolerance for non-humans and wildlife among rich and poor alike, often rooted in millennia of coexistence. People consciously endure significant risks to coexist with animals. However, this dynamic is shifting as cities grow and their dogs become more territorial in crowded and more littered shared spaces.

India has at least 60 million free-ranging dogs, an estimate more than a decade old. More recent surveys found about 1 million in Delhi alone. Relatedly, India also accounts for more than a third of global rabies deaths.

Unlike most western countries, Indian culture and laws forbid culling. Dogs must instead be caught, sterilised, vaccinated and – crucially – returned to their exact territory. In practice, these mandates are frequently ignored.

Things changed in August 2025. After several children were mauled by street dogs, the country’s supreme court briefly ordered all street dogs in Delhi and the surrounding region be rounded up and placed in shelters or pounds, promising dog-free streets for the first time in decades.

The order was unworkable – there simply aren’t shelters for millions of dogs – and sparked a fierce backlash from animal rights groups. Within two days, the court reversed its decision and reinstated the long-standing sterilisation policy.

Subsequent rulings have narrowed the focus. In November 2025 the court ordered dogs be removed from schools, hospitals and public transport zones nationwide, while adding restrictions on public feeding and encouraging fencing to keep dogs away.

Most recently, on January 7, 2026, it directed authorities to fence and secure all of India’s 1.5 million schools and colleges from dogs – all within just eight weeks. Yet, like the earlier order, the aggressive timeline ignores the infrastructure challenges and is unlikely to significantly reduce the frequency of bites or resulting infection. The court is currently holding hearings with interested parties, as it tries to find a middle ground between mass removal of dogs and animal welfare concerns.

The nation is divided. It seems the state cannot kill these dogs, nor house them, nor control them. The question of what to do with them is one of public safety and animal welfare, but also something deeper: the latest chapter in one of evolution’s most remarkable partnerships.

An experiment in coexistence

Dogs are the only vertebrate species that followed human migration out of Africa into every climate and settlement. While the exact moment of domestication is uncertain, we know that dogs evolved to live alongside humans. But our cross-species ties now face unprecedented challenge of tropical urbanism.

In the past few centuries, as dogs earned their way into our homes, humans created over 400 breeds, fine-tuned for companionship, work or aesthetics. This co-evolution matters, as it means dogs are attuned to human cues and form strong attachments to specific people and places. In urban India, where dogs are unowned but aren’t truly wild, that attachment expresses itself as territorial behaviour over a home or someone who feeds them.

India’s unique social-ecological laboratory

India offers an unparalleled window into this relationship. Historically, street dogs served as scavengers. In poorer communities, they still do. But in more prosperous districts, they are now intentionally fed.

Preliminary research in Delhi I carried out with my colleague Bharti Sharma reveals dogs organise into packs around specific households where a few committed feeders can meet nearly 100% of their dietary needs. This supports much higher dog densities than scavenging ever could.

The urban collision

This is where ancient coexistence collides with modern urban design. Indian streets are multi-use spaces. In tropical climates, waste pickers and blue-collar workers often operate at night – the very hours when dogs are most territorial, and when the wealthier residents who feed them are asleep.

Dogs have adapted their behaviour – barking, chasing, occasionally biting – in ways that get unintentionally rewarded by feeders but create hazards for others. The statistics are sobering: millions of bites and thousands of rabies deaths each year.

Yet some backlash to the supreme court’s mandates was inevitable. As gentrification changes who gets to decide what urban life should look like, a conflict of values has emerged. Some value shared animal presence, while others prioritise risk elimination.

The path forward

We may have reached “peak mutualism” in India’s cities. Despite daily nuisances everyone suffers – the barking, the chasing – millions still feed these dogs. Yet the same dog that wags its tail at familiar feeders may bite someone new. This is not irrational aggression; it is territorial protection born of deep association with a specific human community.

Western cities culled their street dogs long ago because social priorities were more uniform. India’s diversity means no such consensus exists. It may take another 20 or 30 years before its urban population uniformly sees the presence of territorial dogs as intolerable.

As India urbanises, it must decide whether to maintain spaces for ancient relationships that predate cities themselves, or follow the western path of total management. My grandmother’s half-chapati ritual represented an older compact: minimal investment, peaceful coexistence and mutual benefit. Delhi’s overfed, territory-defending dogs represent a new, more intensified intimacy – and it is unclear whether this serves either species well.

Nishant Kumar receives funding from the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Fellowship.

He is a DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Fellow hosted at the National Centre for Biological Science, TIFR, Bangalore, India. Department of Biology, University of Oxford is his overseas host for the fellowship. In addition, he is the co-founder and Chief-Scientist of a research think-tank in Delhi, called Thinkpaws: www.Thinkpaws.org.

– ref. India’s 60 million street dogs are turning from village scavengers to city territory defenders – https://theconversation.com/indias-60-million-street-dogs-are-turning-from-village-scavengers-to-city-territory-defenders-272751

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Carole Haswell, Professor of Astrophysics, The Open University

We live in a very exciting time: answers to some of the oldest questions humanity has conceived are within our grasp. One of these is whether Earth is the only place that harbours life.

In the last 30 years, the question of whether the Sun is unique in hosting a planetary system has been resoundingly answered: we now know of thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars.

But can we use telescopes to detect whether any of these distant worlds also harbour life? A promising method is to analyse the gases present in the atmospheres of these planets.

We now know of more than 6,000 exoplanets. With so many now catalogued, there are a number of ways to narrow down which worlds are the most promising for biology. Using the planet’s distance from its host star, for example, astronomers can work out its likely temperature.

Earth is the only planet in the Solar System with liquid water oceans on its surface, so mild temperatures are a possible requirement for a habitable planet. Whether a planet has the correct temperature for liquid water is strongly influenced by the presence and nature of the planet’s atmosphere.

Astonishingly, we can identify molecules present in the atmospheres of exoplanets. Quantum mechanics causes each atmospheric chemical to have its own distinct barcode-like pattern, which it leaves on the light passing through it. By collecting starlight that has been filtered through an exoplanet’s atmosphere, telescopes can see the barcodes of the molecules making up that atmosphere.

To take advantage of this, the planet needs to transit – pass in front of – the star from our point of view. This means it only works for a small fraction of known exoplanets.

The strength of the signal depends on the abundance of the molecule in the atmosphere: stronger for the most abundant molecules and gradually weaker as the abundance decreases. This means it is generally easiest to detect the dominant molecules, though this is not always true. Some of the barcodes are intrinsically strong, while others are weak.

For example, Earth’s atmosphere is dominated by diatomic nitrogen (N₂), but this molecule has a feeble barcode compared to the much less abundant diatomic oxygen (O₂), ozone (O₃), carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water (H₂O).

Detecting molecules

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large space telescope which collects light at infrared wavelengths. It has been used to probe the atmospheres of a variety of exoplanets.

The detection of molecular imprints in the atmosphere of an exoplanet is not completely straightforward. Different teams of workers can derive different results as a consequence of making slightly different choices in the way they handle the same data. But despite these difficulties, reproducible and robust detections of molecules have been made. Simple molecules with strong barcodes such as methane, carbon dioxide and water have been detected.

Planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune – so called sub-Neptunes – are the most common type of known exoplanet. It was for one of these planets, K2-18b, that a bold claim of a detection of a biosignature was made in 2025. The analysis detected dimethyl sulphide, with a claimed less-than-once-chance-in-1,000 that this detection was spurious.

On Earth, dimethyl sulphide is produced by phytoplankton in the oceans, but is rapidly broken down in seawater illuminated by sunlight. As K2-18b may be a
planet completely covered by a water ocean, the detection of dimethyl sulphide in its atmosphere could imply an ongoing supply of it from microbial marine life there.

Re-examination of the K2-18b dimethyl sulphide detection by other researchers casts doubt on this claim. Most significant was the 2025 demonstration by Arizona State University’s Luis Welbanks and colleagues that the choice of molecular barcodes to include in the analysis radically affected the results.

They found that numerous alternatives, not explored in the original paper, provided equally good or better fits to the measured data.

For Earth-sized planets which are presumably rocky, it is quite challenging to detect an atmosphere at all with JWST. However, the future is promising, as a number of planned missions will allow us to learn a lot more about planets which may be similar to the Earth.

Upcoming missions

With a planned launch in 2026, the European Space Agency’s Plato telescope will identify planets far more similar to Earth and suitable for transmission spectroscopy than those we currently know of.

Nasa’s Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, which is set to launch in 2029, will pioneer coronagraphic techniques that allow starlight to be cancelled out so the very much dimmer planets orbiting nearby stars can be studied directly.

The European Space Agency’s Ariel telescope, with a planned launch in 2029, is a dedicated transmission spectroscopy mission, designed to have the capabilities to determine the compositions of exoplanet atmospheres.

Nasa’s Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is currently in the planning stages. This mission will use a coronagraph to study around 25 Earth-like planets, looking for a variety of hallmarks of habitability.

HWO will have broad wavelength coverage from the ultraviolet out to the near-infrared. If a twin of the Earth were orbiting one of HWO’s nearby target stars, the telescope would collect the starlight reflected from the planet. This reflected starlight would include the barcode signatures of diatomic oxygen (O₂) and other gases characteristic of our planet’s atmosphere. It would also reveal a signature of starlight being absorbed by photosynthesising plants: the so-called “vegetation red edge”.

Earth’s surface is divided into land and oceans, which reflect light differently. HWO would be able to reconstruct a low-resolution map of the surface from the changes in the reflected light as continents and oceans rotate in and out of view.

So the future looks very promising. With the spacecraft set to launch in coming years, we might close in on the question of whether Earth is unique in hosting life.

Carole Haswell receives funding from STFC.

– ref. How astronomers plan to detect the signatures of alien life in the atmospheres of distant planets – https://theconversation.com/how-astronomers-plan-to-detect-the-signatures-of-alien-life-in-the-atmospheres-of-distant-planets-272821

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ian Manners, Professor, Department of Political Science, Lund University

European countries, and Denmark in particular, are scrambling to respond to threats from US officials over the future of Greenland.

Having successfully taken out the leadership of Venezuela in a raid on January 3, an emboldened US government is talking about simply taking Greenland for itself.

Various European leaders have expressed their concern but haven’t been able to formulate a coherent response to the betrayal by a supposed ally.

Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, Danish governments have willingly participated in US-led invasions of Afghanistan (2001-2021) and Iraq (2003-2007). The rightward movement across the Danish political spectrum had led to Denmark rejecting some Nordic and EU cooperation in favour of pro-US transatlanticism.

However, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine led to a rethink of Danish foreign policy. The country joined the EU’s common security and defence policy and tightened cooperation with recent Nato members Finland and Sweden.

And when Trump came to power for the second time, the chaotic rightward swing of US foreign policy left Denmark reaching out for support from its EU colleagues over the challenge to Greenland.

While a member of the European Union, Denmark has placed itself at the bloc’s periphery since copying the UK in opting out of the euro and from cooperation in justice and home affairs. But any US invasion of Greenland is likely to break Denmark’s fixed exchange rate policy with the euro (and before that the deutschmark) that has been in place since 1982. So there are economic implications as well as territorial.

The fallout from the US’s threats, and certainly any US intervention in Greenland, go much further than Denmark. While the EU tried to stay in step with the US in its support of Ukraine during Joe Biden’s presidency, since the re-election of Trump, EU member states have very much fallen out with the US. During 2025, the US and EU clashed over trade and tariffs, social media regulation, environment and agriculture policies.

But the latest developments demonstrate that Trump’s US can no longer be trusted as a long-term ally – to Greenland and Denmark, the EU and Europe.

This is a crisis engulfing many countries and triggered by many drivers. In order to understand this complex situation, we can use four different analytical approaches from academic thinking. These can help us contextualise not just the Greenland case, but also the emerging multipolar world of “might makes right”.

1. Realism

Currently the most popular approach comes from within the conservative tradition of “realism”. This predicts every state will act in their own national interest.

In this framing, Trump’s actions are part of the emergence of a multipolar world, in which the great powers are the US, China, India and Russia. In this world, it makes sense for Russia to invade Ukraine to counter the US, for the US to seize assets in Venezuela and Greenland to counter China, and for China to invade Taiwan to counter the US.

2. The new elites

Many think that to understand the events of the past few years, including Trump’s return and Vladimir Putin’s foreign policies, you need to look beyond conservative or liberal explanations to seek out who holds power and influence in the global superpowers. That means the wealthy families, corporations and oligarchs who exert control over the politics of the ruling elite through media and campaign power and finance.

In the cases of Venezuela and Greenland there are two factors at work – the US rejection of the rule of law and the desire for personal wealth via energy resources. But the timing is also important. The operation in Venezuela has been the only story to eclipse the Epstein files in the news in many months.

3. The decline of the liberal order

Many academic explanations see these recent events in the context of the decline of a “liberal order” dominated by the US, Europe, the “developed world” and the UN. In this view, the actions of Putin and Trump are seen as the last days of international law, the importance of the UN, and what western nations see as a system based on multilateralism.

However, this approach tends to overlook the continued dominance of the global north in these systems. The lack of support for the US and EU’s defence of Ukraine has been repeatedly demonstrated in the unwillingness of many global south countries, including China and India, to condemn the Russian invasion in the UN general assembly. It would be interesting to see how such voting would play out if it related to a US invasion of Greenland.

4. The planetary approach

The final – and most important – view is found in the planetary politics approach. This approach is based on the simple observation that so many planetary crises, such as global heating, mass extinctions of wildlife, climate refugees, rising autocracy and the return of international conflict are deeply interrelated and so can only be understood when considered together.

From this perspective it is Greenland’s sustainability and Greenlanders’ lives that must shape the understanding of Denmark’s and other European responses to Trump’s claims. It is through acknowledging the deep relationship that indigenous people have to their ecology that solutions can be found.

And Greenlanders have already expressed their vision for the future. Living on the frontline of the climate crisis, they want an economy built on resilience – not on ego-driven political drama.

While it’s quick and easy to to judge the events in Venezuela or Greenland in terms of the daily news cycle, the four perspectives set out here force people to think for themselves how best to understand complex international crises.

There is, however, a final observation to emphasise. Only one of these perspectives is likely to bring any way of thinking ourselves out of our planetary political crisis.

Ian Manners has received funding from EU Horizon Europe, Independent Research Fund Denmark, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

– ref. Four ways to understand what’s going on with the US, Denmark and Greenland – https://theconversation.com/four-ways-to-understand-whats-going-on-with-the-us-denmark-and-greenland-272873

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Julia Thomas, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University

As Hamnet arrives on the big screen, many fans of the book may feel a familiar mix of excitement and trepidation. They may wonder how the film will bring to life Maggie O’Farrell’s intimate portrayal of Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, and the loss of their son.

There is the thrill of seeing a beloved story imagined on screen. But there is also a quieter fear: that the film will not look like the version already playing in our heads.

For many of us, novels are not just read. They are seen. We carry their worlds in our “mind’s eye”, which is a phrase borrowed, fittingly, from Hamlet itself. When a film adaptation fails to match those private images, disappointment often follows. This is the moment when a viewer may find themselves thinking, or saying aloud, “that’s not how I pictured it”.

The source of this reaction lies in the cognitive process of reading. For most readers, this involves the creation of images in the mind’s eye. We picture scenes, events and characters, however vague or vivid these mental impressions might be. Mental visualisation can form part of the pleasure of reading, immersing the reader in the novel.

We rarely stop to examine these inner images or even notice that we are forming them. Often, we become aware of them only when they are disrupted and when the images on screen fail to align with what we had imagined. It is precisely this gap between mental and material images that may lead to feelings of dissatisfaction, disappointment and even disorientation.

Film adaptations can provoke the “that’s not how I pictured it” reaction, but the complaint itself has a much longer history. It stretches back to the pre-cinematic world of the 19th century, as my research shows. At that time, illustrations – the pictures that appeared in books, magazines and newspapers – were increasingly viewed as a threat to readers’ mental imagery.

The 19th century was the great age of illustration. New printing technology enabled an unprecedented proliferation of images, with texts, from novels to newspapers, adorned with pictures. This expansion brought with it new anxiety about the effects of illustration on readers’ mental visualisation.

When pictures appeared alongside words, as in the case of Charles Dickens’s novels, critics worried that they prevented readers from mentally picturing scenes for themselves. Once a reader had seen illustrator George Cruikshank’s images of Fagin, it was difficult to imagine the character in any other way.

A particular problem arose with works that were first published without illustrations and later re-published in illustrated form. By this point, readers had already mentally visualised the characters and scenes for themselves. Many described feelings of displeasure and disturbance when illustrations failed to coincide with what they had imagined.

A contemporary reviewer of an illustrated novel in 1843 observed that, for readers who had already visualised a novel’s characters, it was very difficult to reconcile themselves to new pictures. Another commented that such illustrations were rarely encountered “without disturbance and discomfort”.

Even the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who illustrated several classic texts, including the works of Chaucer, acknowledged the disappointment that arose when illustrative images failed to coincide with mental ones.

Aphantasia

Yet not everyone responded to illustrations with disappointment. For many readers, illustrated texts were a source of pleasure, especially for those who lacked the capacity to form mental pictures while reading. The term “aphantasia” has only recently been coined to describe the absence of a mind’s eye. It is estimated that around 4% of the global population do not mentally visualise.

Although the word itself was not used in the 19th century, debates about illustrated books frequently acknowledged the value of images for readers who did not mentally picture the words. George du Maurier, himself an illustrator and novelist, argued that illustrators worked primarily for such readers, whom he believed to be the majority.

Read more:
Aphantasia: ten years since I coined the term for lacking a mind’s eye – the journey so far

For aphantasic readers and viewers, the problem of visual mismatch does not arise, since no prior images are formed. In the 19th century, such readers could read illustrated books without the discomfort reported by others, just as they can watch contemporary film adaptations without pre-existing visual expectations. In this sense, screen adaptations may be not only less jarring, but also positively liberating, transforming the words on the page into images that the imagination does not supply.

For those of us who do visualise as we read, however, disappointment at a film adaptation need not signal failure, either of the film or of the imagination. On the contrary, it offers a rare glimpse into the workings of the mind’s eye, revealing just how personal and embodied our engagement with novels really is. Rather than protesting “that’s not how I pictured it”, we might pause to ask why it isn’t, and what that discrepancy reveals about what we see, and what we don’t see, when we read.

Julia Thomas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘That’s not how I pictured it’ – why book-to-film adaptations so often disappoint – https://theconversation.com/thats-not-how-i-pictured-it-why-book-to-film-adaptations-so-often-disappoint-272960

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Abigail Harrison Moore, Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds

Watching Waiting for the Out, the BBC’s flagship new drama series, transported me straight back to my classroom in HMP Wakefield in the mid-1990s. This decaying Victorian building at the heart of a challenged city in the north of England is one of the UK’s ten category-A, high-security prisons for men. Many inmates are on life or whole-life sentences.

I was a naive, young graduate from Yorkshire with limited teaching experience, no teaching qualification and certainly no knowledge of prison education. I was looking to fund my part-time PhD – a qualification that was becoming the prerequisite for employment in universities.

Teaching art and the humanities at HMP Wakefield changed my life, making me the educator and campaigner I am today. As the publicity for Waiting for the Out says: “Freedom isn’t always on the outside.”

This refers to the mental health challenges of the main character, Dan (Josh Finan), a philosophy teacher in a category-B prison somewhere in London, and also his students (men both outside and inside the prison walls). But it also speaks directly to what I came to realise about the power of art education.

In an excruciating but true-to-my-experience dinner party scene, Dan is questioned about why he teaches in a prison. He challenges the other guests’ naive assumptions based on the fact he is a “nepo baby” of former prisoners in his family – his father, uncle and brother. The party concludes that all he does is provide a “two-hour holiday in [the inmates’] heads”.

While this might be seen to dismiss the usual rehabilitative justifications for prison teaching, it is the most accurate description I have yet come across. This series is based on the real-life experiences of a prison educator – Andy West’s 2022 memoir The Life Inside – and it shows.

As a woman teaching in Wakefield – a prison that has been the subject of tabloid speculation due to the infamy of some inmates and the nature of the men’s crimes – I was and still am asked to defend my decision to work there. For many of my students, the only freedom to think critically for themselves, and to develop the communication, analytical and life skills needed for release, was in that prison classroom.

What I learned, and what we see in this drama, was the impact of background. I was a “nice middle-class girl”, brought up in a small Yorkshire town and educated at a good comprehensive school. Some of the men I was teaching, like those in the drama, had not had an education at all. They had learned behaviour in their homes and on the streets that contributed to them being in a category-A prison by the age of 18.

This is not to excuse their crimes – we were required to constantly remind ourselves of these as a protection from manipulation and influence – but to acknowledge the potential of lifelong access to education, even for prisoners.

As the dinner party conversation emphasises, educators cannot “save” inmates and will fail if they try. They just need to teach and (as the classroom scenes often show) challenge their students carefully, ask questions and laugh. I learned that humour was a key way to diffuse difficulties and build trust. I was also aware of my role in changing some of my student’s assumptions about women, as is illustrated carefully and thoughtfully in this drama.

The experience of learning how and why we teach art history, art and the humanities in that prison classroom has driven my work ever since. Thirty years on, as a professor of art history who spends much time battling to enable access to my subject, I found Waiting for the Out speaks directly to the importance and power of teaching.

As the series demonstrates, illiteracy levels are incredibly high among the prison population. As the story of Dris (Francis Lovehall) illustrates, to be unable to read is both humiliating and disabling for men wanting to improve themselves and their relationships with their children while inside.

I will never forget the moment when one of the men in my basic skills class was asked by a prison officer why a painting we had been exploring in class was “impressionist”. His historically driven, thought-provoking response clearly demonstrated the power of art history to build confidence in communication, offer different ways of thinking about the world, and generate different types of conversation between guard and inmate.

Jane Featherstone, the executive producer of Waiting for the Out, sent West’s book to the programme writers. She has spoken of investing in [“visionary story tellers”](https://www.sister.net/about/jane-featherstone “) and has campaigned for better arts education in UK schools, describing the lack of culture in the national curriculum in 2017 as “a deprivation of opportunities for children to reach their full potential as human beings”.

This drive to invest in stories about education that makes a difference has also led her to fund Featherstone Fellowships at the University of Leeds, for art teachers from across the UK to do research that demonstrates the power of art education.

With Waiting for the Out, Featherstone has produced a TV drama that focuses deeply on the power of teaching the arts and humanities in prisons. The fact it does this while also exploring mental health, misogyny, gender politics and the impact of family and social contexts shows the importance of the classroom as a space to potentially influence change.

Watching Waiting for the Out brought back memories for me – but it also spoke to the fundamental need to empower teachers and enable education for all. This incredible drama demonstrates why access to arts education matters, even for those who society wants to forget.

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This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Abigail Harrison Moore has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Research England. Art Teachers Connect is delivered in partnership with the Paul Mellon Centre.

– ref. I taught art in a high-security prison – Waiting for the Out took me straight back to my classroom – https://theconversation.com/i-taught-art-in-a-high-security-prison-waiting-for-the-out-took-me-straight-back-to-my-classroom-272959

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dominik Piehlmaier, Visiting Fellow, Cambridge Judge Business School

When people talk about improving financial literacy, the conversation often focuses on teaching practical skills: how to budget, how to save, how to avoid debt. These lessons feel concrete and actionable. But recent research suggests that the most effective way to change your financial behaviour might be something far less obvious: learning in a more abstract, flexible way.

The new year is often a time when people vow to get a grip on their personal finances. My recent study with my colleague Dee Warmath explored why traditional financial education often fails to translate into good habits that leave us better off.

We found that while people generally do need to improve their financial literacy, simply teaching facts and formulas isn’t enough. What really matters is how adaptable your financial knowledge is when life throws you a curveball.

Most financial education programmes, such as those offered to undergraduate students at university, rely on explicit learning. This means teaching rules and definitions, then testing whether you can recall them. That approach works well for exams, but real life rarely looks like a textbook. You might know the importance of saving, but when your car breaks down or a friend invites you on a last-minute trip, those rules can feel distant.

Our study argues that knowledge exists on a continuum. At one end is the rigid, factual understanding of things like compound interest and inflation. At the other is flexible knowledge – that is to say, the ability to apply principles in unfamiliar situations. We hypothesised that the more flexible your knowledge, the more likely you are to act on it when circumstances change.

Putting it to the test

To see if this theory held up, we ran a multi-session experiment with undergraduate students, most aged 18-22 and from various degree programmes (excluding finance majors). One group received traditional lessons focused on explicit knowledge of finance: definitions, formulas and quizzes. Another group learned through semi-flexible methods, practising with varying scenarios. A third group engaged in fully flexible learning, tackling hands-on challenges that mirrored real-world dilemmas.

In the fully flexible learning group, participants practised strategic thinking through these hands-on challenges. This included allocating limited resources across competing priorities or working through ambiguous scenarios with no single “right” answer. This encouraged them to weigh trade-offs, anticipate consequences and adapt when conditions change. The goal was to build mental agility, so that they learned how to approach complex choices rather than rely on fixed formulas.

Students chose between two distinct options for how to allocate resources, each with trade-offs between immediate rewards and delayed outcomes. As an example, one choice offered an immediate payment of US$45 (£33) for taking part in the experiment or a delayed payment of US$54 five days later. This represented an annual interest rate of more than 1,000%.

Overall, the results were striking. Students who learned in this more abstract, adaptable way were significantly more likely to adopt positive financial behaviour. This was measured by the likelihood of identifying and choosing the option that would maximise their payoffs. They didn’t just know what to do, they actually did it.

In contrast, those who focused on specific lessons seemed to struggle to apply their knowledge outside the classroom. Our research suggests that abstract learning helps you build mental models that can be reshaped as situations change.

Instead of memorising a rule like “always save 10% of what you earn”, you learn how to think about trade-offs, priorities and long-term goals. That mindset makes it easier to navigate unexpected expenses or tempting splurges.

In other words, teaching people what to think is less powerful than teaching them how to think. Many universities offer free online courses on how to use these flexible tools in the course of your daily life.

If we want financial education to work, programmes need to move beyond rote learning. Here are a few ideas inspired by our study:

1. use scenario-based exercises that mimic real-life challenges
2. encourage reflection so learners connect principles to their own circumstances
3. focus on problem-solving rather than memorising, helping students adapt when rules don’t fit perfectly.

This approach doesn’t just apply to money. Whether you’re teaching healthy living habits, sustainability or digital safety, the same principle holds. Flexible knowledge drives behaviour change.

Improving financial literacy is still important, but it’s not the whole story. The real breakthrough comes when education equips people to handle complexity and uncertainty. Life rarely follows a script, and neither should our learning.

So if you want to improve your finances, don’t just learn the tips and tricks. Seek out experiences that challenge you to think broadly and adapt. It turns out that the most practical skill you can learn might be the ability to apply abstract ideas when reality gets messy.

Dominik Piehlmaier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The surprising way you could improve your finances in 2026, according to research – https://theconversation.com/the-surprising-way-you-could-improve-your-finances-in-2026-according-to-research-272739