Some professors from Ivey Business School have written a nice little PDF e-book about behavioral economics. Behavioral Economics for Kids
As you read it, you may think that you have heard some of these things before, from sociology, from anthropology, from psychology. And indeed you have.
What you are hearing now are things about how humans behave that were figured out by economists.
Essentially where we are now with this stuff is that economists seem to have finally determined that rational theories of behavior are in fact not descriptive of reality. Other disciplines knew that, but we are finally getting some convergence of research. So this is a good thing. But it isn't all new.
