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When designing economic policies, policy makers work with the assumption that targeted beneficiaries would respond in a manner that would lead to success of the policy. However, the responses of beneficiaries do not always follow the expected pattern. Drawing on Thaler and Sunstein’s (2008) and Asante’s (2003) theses, this paper projects the view that economic policies that fail to take account of the psychology of the target people fail. The position in this paper is based on the premises that human beings, as choice architects, are not necessarily rational beings always acting in their self-interests and that culture, traditions, and national aspirations influence the success of economic policies. It is argued that inertia (the unwillingness to move or change the status quo) is related to how individuals living in poverty respond to policies intended to alleviate their conditions. New theoretical insights are advanced and recommendations made on the basis of the exploration of the literature.

This paper draws primarily on my own scholarship, supplemented by the limited academic resources available in the “peripheries” of the world where I live and work (namely, Somali society and Darfur, Sudan), to consider the relationship between colonialism and psychology. I first consider the history of psychology in justifying and bolstering oppression and colonialism. I then consider the ongoing intersection of colonialism and psychology in the form of metacolonialism (or coloniality). I end with thoughts about decolonizing psychological science in teaching, social, and clinical practice. To decolonize psychological science, it is necessary to transform its focus from promotion of individual happiness to cultivation of collective well-being, from a concern with instinct to promotion of human needs, from prescriptions for adjustment to affordances for empowerment, from treatment of passive victims to creation of self-determining actors, and from globalizing, top-down approaches to context-sensitive, bottom-up approaches. Only then will the field realize its potential to advance Frantz Fanon’s call for humane and just social order.