Van Gelder, J-L, Luciano, E., Kranenbarg, M.W., & Hershfield, H.E. (2015). Criminology, 53, 1-22.
In a field experiment, we use a novel method to test whether instilling a greater sense of vividness of the future self motivates people to act in a more future-oriented way and reduces their delinquent involvement. We manipulate vividness of the future self by having participants, a sample of high-school youth (N = 133), “befriend” an avatar representing their future self on a social network website. For 7 days, they reply to short messages from their future self designed to trigger thinking about that distant self. Us- ing repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), we find that participants who had been linked to their future self report less delinquent involvement, whereas con- trols did not. Furthermore, the results of a nonparametric bootstrapping procedure show that this effect is mediated by changes in vividness of the future self, such that increases in vividness lead to lower self-reported delinquency. We conclude that vivid- ness of the future self holds promise not only as a cognitive explanation for the failure to make informed cost–benefit trade-offs but also for interventions aiming to reduce delinquency.