My friends and former Duke mentors Scott de Marchi and Jay Hamilton have just written You Are What You Choose, a book about the factors that predict individual choices in political and economic life. The authors argue convincingly that a battery of personality characteristics they call TRAITS (Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo, and Stickiness) are powerful predictors of choice above and beyond the demographic and microtargeting data typically used by marketers.

The genre of scientifically-inspired books on marketing and mass behavior is obviously getting crowded, but I think this book stands out in two important respects. First, it is not a gloss on published research by a journalist, but the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between a political scientist (de Marchi) and an economist (Hamilton) who believe that their disciplines have neglected the role of personality characteristics in decision-making. Second, the authors present a variety of creative tests of their theory on real data, something you almost never see outside the academic literature.

Going forward, there is a great deal of work to be done in reconciling psychology with political science and economics. I hope de Marchi and Hamilton will investigate how their measures perform in comparison with existing scales and literature in psychology.

For more, see Time’s Q&A with the authors and the book’s website.

(Disclosure: I got a free copy of the book from the authors.)