In the current Harvard Business Review Hal Hershfield a professor of marketing atNew YorkUniversity’s business school discusses several studies showing that people have a third-person perspective on themselves in the distant future. One study for example used functional MRI scans to show that people’s neural patterns differed depending on whether they were describing themselves in the present or ten years in the future.
Yet Professor Hershfield’s brain scans revealed that some subjects did think of their current and future selves as the same person and when asked to choose between a financial investment providing a small short-term gain or a larger long-term profit these people chose the latter. By contrast those who thought of their current and future selves as two different people usually opted for the immediate profit. Hershfield says he “wanted to see if we could change the attitudes of [the latter group]. Could we help people get to know — and show more regard for — their future selves?”
So he and fellow researchers decided to give people vivid images of their older selves to test whether seeing such pictures would change their spending and saving preferences:
We took photos of our subjects and used software to create digital avatars — half of which were aged with jowls bags under the eyes and gray hair…. Afterward we asked them to allocate $1 000 among four options — buying something nice for someone special investing in a retirement fund planning a fun event or putting money into a checking account. Subjects exposed to aged avatars [but only their own not those of others] put nearly twice as much money into the retirement fund as the other people.
Create a free account to keep reading.
