Rethinking Time: AN INTRODUCTION TO the Future Self

Hershfield, H. E., Shu, S., Benartzi, S. (2020). Marketing Science.

A growing percentage of American workers are now freelancers and thus responsible for their own retirement savings, yet they face a number of psychological hurdles that hamper them from saving enough money for the long-term. Although prior theory-derived interventions have been successful in addressing some of these obstacles, encouraging participation in saving programs is a challenging endeavor for policymakers and consumers alike. In a field setting, we test whether framing savings in more or less granular formats (e.g., saving daily versus monthly) can encourage continued saving behavior through increasing the take-up of a recurring deposit program. Among thousands of new users of a financial technology app, we find that framing deposits in daily amounts as opposed to monthly amounts quadruples the number of consumers who enroll. Further, framing deposits in more granular terms reduced the participation gap between lower and higher income consumers: three times as many consumers in the highest rather than lowest income bracket participated in the program when it was framed as a $150 monthly deposit, but this difference in participation was eliminated when deposits were framed as $5 per day.

Hershfield, H. E., & Maglio, S. J. (2019). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication.

Through the process of prospection, people can mentally travel in time to summon in their mind’s eye events that have yet to occur. Such depictions of the future often differ than those of the present, as do choices made for these 2 time periods. Conceptually and semantically, this research tradition presupposes a division between the 2: At some point in the progression of time, the present must yield to the future. Still, the field to date has offered little insight by way of defining the division that separates the present from the future. The basic scientific appeal and practical implications of prospection beg 2 related questions: When do people believe that the present ends and the future begins, and do such perceptions affect decision-making? To the first question, perceptions of when the present ends vary across people (Study 1) and are reliable over time (Study 2). To the second, when people believe that the present ends sooner, they are more likely to make future-oriented choices in correlational and experimental contexts, even when controlling for potentially related constructs (Studies 3–5). Finally, we identify a psychological mechanism underlying this relationship: A shorter present is associated with a sharper division from the future (Study 6a), and this sharp division accounts for future-oriented behavior toward both hypothetical (Study 6b) and incentive-compatible (Study 6c) outcomes. This research sheds light on a foundational but unexplored prerequisite for thinking and acting across time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)