Preferences are of fundamental importance for human behaviour. Risk preferences have been shown to affect anything from financial investments, to job and education choices, marriage decisions , and health behaviours. Trust has been linked to openness to trade, while patience has been linked to saving. Preferences towards risk and time may further contribute to shaping growth and development processes through their role as drivers of entrepreneurship. That raises the important question of what determines preferences. Economists have long eschewed this question, postulating preferences to be exogenous to their models or `innate’. This stance is now quickly eroding. I propose to contribute to this debate by systematically investigating the causal determinants of preferences, as well as documenting the causal effects of preferences on economic behaviour.