Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (2009) is a book by economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller written to promote the understanding of the role played by emotions in influencing economic decision making.

The book asserts that a variety of otherwise puzzling questions can be answered once one allows for the effect that emotional drives, or "animal spirits," have on economic factors.

While finishing the work after the 2007–2008 financial crisis the authors set themselves the additional aim of promoting a much more aggressive US government intervention to alleviate the crises than has been seen as of February 2009.

Keynes (1883-1946) used "animal spirits" to describe the psychological forces that partly explain why the economy does not behave in the manner predicted by classical economics.

Here the authors discuss eight important questions about the economy, which they assert can only be satisfactorily answered by a theory that takes animal spirits into account.

Chapter 7 discusses why animal spirits make central banks a necessity, and there is a post script about how they can intervene to help with the current crises.

Chapter 8 tackles the reasons for unemployment, which the authors say is partly due to animal spirits such as concerns for fairness and the money illusion.

The authors show how effects of animal spirits refutes the monetarist theory that there is a natural rate of employment which it is not desirable to exceed.

Andrew Rosenblum from The New York Observer says "Animal Spirits is most compelling when the authors summon all the key behavioral patterns to explain vast, complex phenomena such as the Great Depression....