"I Have No Energy or Motivation." Feeling Motivated: How to Get There
Updated: Jun 3, 2023
*Not financial advice - your money, your choice*
Do you ever struggle to save for the future because it feels too far away to be real? What if you could see your future self, with gray hair and wrinkles, looking back at you in the mirror?
Research suggests that digitally aged photos of ourselves can help us empathize with and care more about our future selves, ultimately leading to better financial decisions and even ethical behavior.
The study was conducted by Hal Hershfield [Associate Professor of Marketing, Behavioral Decision Making, and Psychology at UCLA] and G. Elliott Wimmer and Brian Knutson at Stanford. They used fMRI tech to monitor the brains of people to find out why we feel so disconnected from our future selves.
They found, that when people described themselves ten years in the future, their neural patterns were quite different from those seen when people were asked to describe their current selves.
In an asset allocation task, people who had the largest brain activity change when discussing their future selves, that is, people who viewed their future selves as very different from their present selves, were the least likely to favor large long-term gains over small and more immediate ones.
However, in follow-up experiments, when people were shown aged avatars of themselves, that tendency disappeared. People exposed to aged avatars put nearly twice as much money into their retirement fund as other people who were shown current avatars, proving that, by seeing images of our older selves, we can better empathize with our future selves and make better long-term decisions.
In these follow-up experiments, Hershfield partnered with Daniel Goldstein of Microsoft Research, Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford, and several other Stanford researchers to see if giving people vivid images of their older selves would change spending and savings preferences.
They took photos of their participants and used software to create digital avatars, half of which were aged with jowls, bags under the eyes, and gray hair. Wearing VR goggles, the participants then explored a virtual environment and came to a mirror that reflected a current-self-avatar or a future-self-avatar.
They were then asked to allocate $1,000 to 4 options:
Something nice for someone special.
Investing in a retirement fund.
Planning a fun event.
Putting the money into a checking account.
People exposed to a future-self-avatar put nearly 2x the money into the retirement fund as the people exposed to the the current-self-avatar.
Interested with these study results, I played around with a new-ish tool, FaceApp, to try and understand why Hershfield and his peers got the results they did.
If you do decide to use this app or a similar app, please read the terms of use as most of them get full rights to use your pictures/data for pretty much whatever they want. But, if you don't agree to those terms, you can just look at my picture:
Picture generated by FaceApp
Merrill Lynch began using some similar tech in 2012 in their Face Retirement app (haha, great pun) but they don't appear to still be using the tool... perhaps due to its creepy results, below, or concerns around biometric data collection.
Picture from Merrill Lynch's Face Retirement App
Check out a short video on the Face Retirement app, here.
In a follow-up experiment, they took pictures of people with happy, sad, and neutral expressions and inserted them into a retirement fund slider tool. The idea was to show users how their decisions affected their future income and well-being in old age. Some participants used a tool with pictures of themselves that had been aged while they used the slider tool. On average, they set aside 6.8% of their pay for retirement vs 5.2% for those using a tool with pictures of their current selves.
Even with variable photo quality and neutral expressions, those with an aged picture next to the slider tool prompted people to save 6.2% on average, versus 4.4% for those with photos of their current self next to the slider tool. If you're wondering how/what you need to put money into to save on taxes and for retirement, check out this post. Just looking to start investing? Check out on this one.
Hershfield has also worked with Jean-Louis van Gelder of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement and Loran Nordgren of the Kellogg School to test whether people act more ethically when they feel closer to their future selves.
In one of those studies, young adults who’d been asked to write a letter to themselves 20 years in the future were less likely to say that they had made an amoral choice (like buying a stolen laptop) than people who’d been asked to write themselves three months in the future.
In yet another study, using the VR method described earlier, Hershfield and the research team found that 18-16-year-olds presented with avatars of their 40-year-old selves were less likely to cheat on a test than those who saw present-day avatars of themselves.
This tech and knowledge could have great applications for financial services but it can also be used to change other behaviors by making people feel more connected to their senior selves like brushing their teeth 2x a day. Which, if you’re like me, could use a little improvement.
If you’re looking to make a change in your habits (like brushing your teeth or contributing more to a Roth IRA), Hal suggests that printing an aged photo of yourself and putting it on your desk or on your bathroom mirror could help.
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