WHEN YOUR FUTURE SELF IS A STRANGER
We all care more about our own well-being than that of a stranger—that’s human nature. It is only
logical, then, that we would put our present selves’ wants above our future selves’ welfare. Why
invest in a stranger’s future, especially at the expense of your own present comfort?
Hal Ersner-Hershfield, a psychologist at New York University, believes
that this self-interest is
behind one of the biggest challenges facing our aging society. People are living longer but retiring at
the same age, and most have not financially prepared themselves for the extra years. It is estimated
that two-thirds of Baby Boomers have not saved enough money to maintain their standard of living in
retirement. In fact, a 2010 survey found that 34 percent of Americans had absolutely zero retirement
savings, including 53 percent of those under the age of thirty-three, and 22 percent of those sixty-five
or older. Ersner-Hershfield (a young guy himself, who at the time, did not have much saved) thought
that maybe people were not saving for their future selves because it felt like putting money away for a
stranger.
To find out, he created a measure of “future-self continuity”—the degree to which you see your
future self as essentially the same person as your current self. Not everyone views the future self as a
total stranger; some of us feel quite close and connected to our future selves. Figure 1 illustrates the
wide range of relationships people have to their future selves. (Take a look at the figure, choose the
pair of circles that seems most accurate to you, then come back.) Ersner-Hershfield has found that
people with high future-self continuity—that is, their circles overlap more—save
more money and
rack up less credit card debt, building a significantly better financial future for their future selves to
enjoy.
Figure 1. Everybody changes over time.Which of these pairs of circles best represents how similar
your present self is to your future self twenty years from now?
If feeling estranged from your future self leads to short-sighted financial decisions, can getting to
know your future self lead to greater savings? Ersner-Hershfield decided to test this possibility by
introducing college students to their retirement-age selves. Working with professional computer
animators using age-progression software, he created three-dimensional avatars of participants as
they would look at retirement age.
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Ersner-Hershfield’s aim was to help his young participants feel
like the age-progression really was them—not a relative (the most common
response from students
was, “That looks just like Uncle Joe [or Aunt Sally]!”), and not a creature from a horror movie. To
get to know their future selves, the students interacted with their age-advanced avatars in an
immersive virtual reality setup. The participants sat in front of a mirror, but they saw reflected their
future selves. If the participant moved her head, her future self moved her head. If she turned
sideways, her future self turned sideways. While participants watched
their future selves in the
mirror, an experimenter asked each participant questions, such as “What is your name?” “Where are
you from?” and “What is your passion in life?” As the participant answered, it appeared as though the
future self was speaking.
After spending time with their future selves, participants left the virtual reality lab and began a
hypothetical budgeting task. They were given $1,000 and asked to divvy it up among present
expenses, a fun splurge,
a checking account, and a retirement account. Students who had interacted
with their future selves put more than twice as much money into their retirement accounts as students
who had spent time looking at their young selves in a real mirror. Getting to know their future selves
made the students more willing to invest in them—and, by extension, themselves.
Although the technology is not yet widely available, one can imagine the day when every human
resources office has new employees interact with their future selves before enrolling in the
company’s retirement plan. In the meantime, there are other ways to get to know your future self (see
Willpower Experiment: “Meet Your Future Self ”). Strengthening your future-self
continuity can do
more than fatten your savings—it can help you with any willpower challenge. High future-self
continuity seems to propel people to be the best version of themselves
now
. For example, Ersner-
Hershfield noticed that people high in future-self continuity were more likely to show up for the study
on time, and people low in future-self continuity were more likely to blow the study off and have to
reschedule. Struck
by this accidental finding, he began to explore how future-self continuity affects
ethical decision making. His most recent work shows that people with low future-self continuity
behave less ethically in business role-play scenarios. They are more likely to pocket money found in
the office, and more comfortable leaking information that could ruin another person’s career. They
also lie more in a game that rewards deception with money. It is as if feeling disconnected from our
future selves gives us permission to ignore the consequences of our actions. In contrast, feeling
connected to our future selves protects us from our worst impulses.
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