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.