TJL #60: Think of future you (Daily productivity #35)

Productivity tips that work for me and might work for you

Jan 23, 2021

To Sell Is Human Video Overview | Daniel H. Pink

Today’s tip comes from To Sell Is Human. Read the story down below:

But Hal Hershfield, a social psychologist at New York University, thought the barrier to moving people to save for retirement might be something else altogether. Working with six far-flung colleagues, he conducted a series of studies to test a different hypothesis. In one experiment, Hershfield and team had each of their participants strap on a virtual reality headset. Half the participants saw a digital representation of themselves—an avatar—for about a minute and then had a brief conversation with a digital representation of a researcher. The other half also saw an avatar of themselves through the headset. But for this group, researchers used a computer software package that ages faces to create an avatar that showed what the participant would look like at age seventy. This group gazed at the seventy-year-old version of themselves for about a minute and then had the same brief conversation with the researcher’s avatar.
Afterward, the experimenters gave both groups a money allocation task. Imagine, they told the participants, that you’ve just received an unexpected $1,000. How would you allocate the money among the following four options?
“Use it to buy something nice for someone special.”
“Invest it in a retirement fund.”
“Plan a fun and extravagant occasion.”
“Put it in a checking account.”
Those who saw images of their current selves (call them the “Me Now” group) directed an average of $80 into the retirement account. Those who saw images of their future selves (the “Me Later” group) allocated more than twice that amount—$172.3
To determine more precisely what was driving the discrepancy in response—whether it was the sight of their own aging face or the reminder of aging in general—the researchers tried a similar experiment with a different set of participants. This time, half the participants saw an age-morphed image of themselves (“Me Later”) and half saw an age-morphed image of someone else (“You Later”). The results weren’t even close. Those who saw the image of themselves at age seventy saved more than those who’d simply seen a picture of a seventy-year-old. When researchers conducted similar experiments using equipment less complicated than an immersive virtual reality environment, the pattern held. The “Me Later” group always saved more.4
The problem we have saving for retirement, these studies showed, isn’t only our meager ability to weigh present rewards against future ones. It is also the connection—or rather, the disconnection—between our present and future selves. Other research has shown that “thinking about the future self elicits neural activation patterns that are similar to neural activation patterns elicited by thinking about a stranger.”5 Envisioning ourselves far into the future is extremely difficult—so difficult, in fact, that we often think of that future self as an entirely different person. “To people estranged from their future selves, saving is like a choice between spending money today and giving it to a stranger years from now.”6
Hershfield and his colleagues discovered that trying to solve an existing problem—getting people to better balance short-term and long-term rewards—was insufficient because it wasn’t the problem that most needed solving. The researchers’ breakthrough was to identify a new, and previously unknown, problem: that we think of ourselves today and ourselves in the future as different people. Once they identified that alternative problem, they were able to fashion a solution: Show people an image of themselves getting old. And that, in turn, addressed the broader concern—namely, encouraging people to save more money for retirement.

Moral of the story

Change your perspective, change your behavior.

How do we act now in such a way that future you, which is the same person just later in time, is happy? To change your behavior now, think of future you.

Previous TJLs

Read my previous TJLs by following on the links down below:

Today Jan Learned

Discussion about this post