Eric W. Dolan Is Betting That People Want the Science Behind Their Money

Eric W. Dolan has spent roughly fifteen years in journalism, and he had no particular need to start something new. He did it anyway. In 2026 he launched Science of Money (www.scienceofmoney.org), an editorial site that translates academic and technical research into plain-language articles for a general audience — across nine categories spanning neuroeconomics, behavioral finance, the psychology of selling and marketing, of leadership, of entrepreneurship, and of the workplace, the sociology of wealth, AI in business, and a running business-news desk.

The idea grew out of a specific frustration. Looking at the sprawling world of marketing, selling, and investing content, Dolan kept seeing the same thing. “I kept running into generic slop,” he said. “The same recycled advice everywhere. Meanwhile the actual research was so much more interesting — and almost nobody was bringing it to a general audience.”

You can see the corrective in the work. One of the site’s pieces takes the social-media gospel of “manifesting” and checks it against the data, reporting that believers feel more successful but, by objective measures, generally aren’t — and tend to take riskier financial bets. Another explains why so many people pay down the wrong loan first, costing themselves interest, because an old debt simply feels heavier. The throughline is a refusal to take the conventional wisdom at face value.

The site began from a narrower seed — the psychology of selling — before the concept widened into the broader science of money. That origin is still its center of gravity: the Psychology of Selling and Marketing category is by far the most developed, home to pieces like the counterintuitive finding that overconfident salespeople are the worst performers of all, trailing well-calibrated peers by a striking margin.

Dolan’s motivation for the site is unpretentious. “I want to help people navigate the financial world a little better,” he said, “just by giving them access to information they wouldn’t otherwise find.” Asked who he’s building it for, his answer is simply: everyone. There’s no narrowly imagined reader — just the belief that good information about money should be available to anyone willing to read it.

What’s striking is how openly he discusses the doubt. The hardest part, he says, wasn’t the concept — it was the will to begin again. “Finding the motivation to start something new, when you already have a successful website, is genuinely hard,” he said. And he is candid that the outcome is uncertain: “Building a publication from the ground up is daunting. I’m not sure yet whether it can succeed.” Coming from someone who has done this work for fifteen years, the honesty lands as confidence rather than its opposite — the calm of a person who knows exactly how much work the next few years will take.

That clear-eyed patience shapes the plan. Over the next six to twelve months, Dolan intends to grow Science of Money’s readership gradually, through search and social media, aiming for roughly 50,000 pageviews a month by the end of 2026. It’s a compounding goal, not a viral one.

The bet runs against the grain of the market. Research-grade content is slow to produce and aimed at a narrower audience than the mass-market money space. But the conviction is that the narrower audience is real, underserved, and loyal — that some meaningful number of people would rather understand the evidence than be handed another tip. In a market drowning in financial advice, Dolan’s wager is that the thing actually missing is the science underneath it.