RESEARCH

Hershfield, H.E., John, E.M. & Reiff, J.S. (2018). Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5(2) , 209–215.

Prior policy work has effectively eased some financial problems that Americans face: Automatic enrollment in retirement saving accounts has drastically increased the number of workers who participate in defined contribution retirement plans. Yet, such choice architecture interventions cannot always be implemented, and even when they can, they are beholden to whatever decisions the choice architect made and, in any case, may not go far enough in helping maximize financial well-being over time. Additional interventions thus need to complement already successful choice architecture ones. Namely, because many financial decisions involve trade-offs between present and future selves, with the present self often being prioritized, this review highlights interventions that make the future self more vivid to decision makers. We discuss the theoretical background underlying such interventions, the factors that may make vividness interventions more or less effective in policy contexts, and possible future directions for researchers and policy makers.

Hershfield, H.E. (2018). Current Opinion in Psychology, 26 , 72–75.

People often have difficulty making decisions that maximize well-being over time, and researchers have explored various reasons for why such poor ‘intertemporal’ decision-making may arise. In this article, I review a body of work that has focused on how the relationship between current and future selves may influence judgments and decisions. Namely, I spotlight research suggesting that the future self is often thought of as another person and how feelings about this ‘other’ person impact decisions across domains. I then review two insights gleaned from this research: in order to positively modify long-term decision-making, interventions may wish to focus on (1) strengthening the felt bond between current and future selves, or (2) reducing the subjective pain of sacrifices made by the current self. I close with several questions future research may wish to address.

Hershfield, H.E. & Bartels, D. (2018). The Future Self, In Oettingen, G., Sevincer, A.T., & Gollwitzer, P.M. (eds). The Psychology of Thinking about the Future. The Guilford Press.

Whether it is the choice between spending and saving, eating a tempting dessert versus maintaining one’s diet, or sinning rather than acting in a less exciting but more morally upstanding way, many decisions require making tradeoffs between the present and the future.

Rutchick, A.M., Slepian, M.L., Reyes, M.O., Pleskus, L.N., & Hershfield, H.E. (2018). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 24, No. 1 , 72-80.

To the extent that people feel more continuity between their present and future selves, they are more likely to make decisions with the future self in mind. The current studies examined future self-continuity in the context of health. In Study 1, people reported the extent to which they felt similar and connected to their future self; people with more present-future continuity reported having better subjective health across a variety of measures. In Study 2, people were randomly assigned to write a letter to themselves either three months or 20 years into the future; people for whom continuity with the distant future self was enhanced exercised more in the days following the writing task. These findings suggest that future self-continuity promotes adaptive long-term health behavior, suggesting the promise of interventions enhancing future self-continuity.

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.

van Gelder, J-L, Hershfield, H.E., & Nordgren, L.F. (2013). Psychological Science, 24(6), 974-980.

The tendency to live in the here and now, and the failure to think through the delayed consequences of behavior, is one of the strongest individual-level correlates of delinquency. We tested the hypothesis that this correlation results from a limited ability to imagine one’s self in the future, which leads to opting for immediate gratification. Strengthening the vividness of the future self should therefore reduce involvement in delinquency. We tested and found support for this hypothesis in two studies. In Study 1, compared with participants in a control condition, those who wrote a letter to their future self were less inclined to make delinquent choices. In Study 2, participants who interacted with a realistic digital version of their future, age-progressed self in a virtual environment were less likely than control participants to cheat on a subsequent task.

Bryan, C.J. & Hershfield, H.E. (2012). You owe it to yourself: Boosting retirement saving with a responsibility-based appeal. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 429-432.

Americans are not saving enough for retirement. Previous research suggests that this is due, in part, to people’s tendency to think of the future self as more like another person than like the present self, making saving feel like giving money away rather than like investing in oneself. Using objective employer saving data, a field experiment capitalized on this phenomenon to increase saving. It compared the effectiveness of a novel message—one appealing to people’s sense of “social” responsibility to their future selves— with a more traditional appeal to people’s sense of rational self-interest. The social-responsibility-to- the-future-self message resulted in larger increases in saving than the self-interest message, but only to the extent that people felt a strong “social” connection to their future selves. These results broaden our understanding of the psychology of moral responsibility and refine our understanding of the role of future-self continuity in fostering intertemporal patience. They further demonstrate how understanding conceptions of the self over time can suggest solutions to important and challenging policy problems.

Hershfield, H.E., Goldstein, D.G., Sharpe, W.F., Fox, J., Yeykelvis, L., Carstensen, L.L., & Bailenson, J. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48, S23-S27.

Many people fail to save what they will need for retirement. Research on excessive discounting of the future suggests that removing the lure of immediate rewards by precommitting to decisions or elaborating the value of future rewards both can make decisions more future oriented. The authors explore a third and complementary route, one that deals not with present and future rewards but with present and future selves. In line with research that shows that people may fail, because of a lack of belief or imagination, to identify with their future selves, the authors propose that allowing people to interact with age-progressed renderings of themselves will cause them to allocate more resources to the future. In four studies, participants interacted with realistic computer renderings of their future selves using immersive virtual reality hardware and interactive decision aids. In all cases, those who interacted with their virtual future selves exhibited an increased tendency to accept later monetary rewards over immediate ones.

Hershfield, H.E. (2011). Future self-continuity: How conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1235(2011), 30-43.

With life expectancy dramatically increasing throughout much of the world, people have to make choices with a longer future in mind than they ever had to before. Yet, many indicators suggest that undersaving for the long term often occurs: in America, for instance, many individuals will not be able to maintain their preretirement standard of living in retirement. Previous research has tried to understand problems with intertemporal choice by focusing on the ways in which people treat present and future rewards. In this paper, the author reviews a burgeoning body of theoretical and empirical work that takes a different viewpoint, one that focuses on how perceptions of the self over time can dramatically affect decision making. Specifically, when the future self shares similarities with the present self, when it is viewed in vivid and realistic terms, and when it is seen in a positive light, people are more willing to make choices today that may benefit them at some point in the years to come.

Ersner-Hershfield, H., Garton, M.T., Ballard, K., Samanez-Larkin, G.R., & Knutson, B. (2009). Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow: Individual differences in future self-continuity account for saving. Judgment and Decision Making, 4(4), 280-286.

Some people find it more difficult to delay rewards than others. In three experiments, we tested a “future self- continuity” hypothesis that individual differences in the perception of one’s present self as continuous with a future self would be associated with measures of saving in the laboratory and everyday life. Higher future self-continuity (assessed by a novel index) predicted reduced discounting of future rewards in a laboratory task, more matches in adjectival descriptions of present and future selves, and greater lifetime accumulation of financial assets (even after controlling for age and education). In addition to demonstrating the reliability and validity of the future self-continuity index, these findings are consistent with the notion that increased future self-continuity might promote saving for the future.

Ersner-Hershfield, H., Wimmer, G.E., & Knutson, B. (2009). Neural evidence for self-continuity in temporal discounting. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4(1), 85-92.

Despite increases in the human life span, people have not increased their rate of saving. In a phenomenon known as ‘temporal discounting’, people value immediate gains over future gains. According to a future self-continuity hypothesis, individuals per- ceive and treat the future self differently from the present self, and so might fail to save for their future. Neuroimaging offers a novel means of testing this hypothesis, since previous research indicates that self- vs other-judgments elicit activation in the rostral anterior cingulate (rACC). Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we predicted and found not only individual differences in rACC activation while rating the current vs future self, but also that individual differences in current vs future self activation predicted temporal discounting assessed behaviorally a week after scanning. In addition to supporting the future self-continuity hypothesis, these findings hold implications for significant financial decisions, such as choosing whether to save for the future or spend in the present.

Hershfield, H.E., Cohen, T., & Thompson, L. (2012). Short horizons and shady situations: When lack of continuity to our future selves leads to unethical behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 117, 298-310.

People who feel continuity with their future selves are more likely to behave in ethically responsible ways as compared to people who lack continuity with their future selves. We find that individual differences in perceived similarity to one’s future self predicts tolerance of unethical business decisions (Studies 1a and 1b), and that the consideration of future consequences mediates the extent to which people regard inappropriate negotiation strategies as unethical (Study 2). We reveal that low future self-continuity predicts unethical behavior in the form of lies, false promises, and cheating (Studies 3 and 4), and that these relationships hold when controlling for general personality dimensions and trait levels of self-control (Study 4). Finally, we establish a causal relationship between future self-continuity and ethical judgments by showing that when people are prompted to focus on their future self (as opposed to the future), they express more disapproval of unethical behavior (Study 5).