New ways to see the stranger in ourselves

Age progression rendering from Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice

If you could see yourself 20, 30, or more years into the future, you’d be more aggressive about saving for retirement.

That was the hypothesis posed by UCLA researcher Hal Hershfield as reported in HBR in 2013, and updated in a newly published ScienceDirect article. In his manuscript Hershfield presented an intriguing thought: “In important ways, people often treat the future self as if it is in fact another person.”

To see if helping people see more vividly into the future could help mitigate that disconnect, his study presented young adults a rendering of themselves as if they had aged 40 years, then gauged their propensity to save. Result: they were likely to save 30% more toward retirement than those who weren’t given the visual stimulus.

That’s an oversimplification of it, of course, so take time to read more about the studies. In the meantime, financial services marketers — and those in other behaviorally-challenged categories — should heed the wake up call: with tools that can paint a more lifelike future canvas, such as virtual reality, and the ability now to continually nudge prospects and customers in ways that can help overcome biases such as loss aversion and temporal discounting, the opportunities to test new strategies and tactics should not be overlooked.