“The Psychology of Future Planning: Concrete Emotions and Virtual Self-Encounters”

We are guided by concrete emotions

“The present is concrete and, in most cases, rooted in the physical, with our decisions guided by physical and concrete feelings like hunger or fear. The future, on the other hand, is more abstract,’ says Wittmann.

This is one of the main reasons why people often find it difficult to stick to a diet or other resolution. Future goals are not as attractive as getting an instant reward.

Better less money now than more later

Marc Wittmann and his colleagues demonstrated this in an experiment where people could choose between having 100 pounds in hand now or 140 pounds a week from now. Most people chose to receive the smaller amount on the spot.

This phenomenon is known as temporal discounting and reflects our willingness to forego a future gain in exchange for an immediate reward.

In fact, we are neglecting our future situation. This is similar to the behavior that some people prefer to spend their money now to enjoy their life rather than save for old age.

Virtual meeting with ‘your future self’

We are not so connected to our ‘future self’, but more to our ‘present self’. In some exciting experiments, researchers have managed to change this by showing people an older version of themselves in virtual reality.

Hal Hershfield, a behavioral economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, in collaboration with a group of researchers, put photos of test subjects into a program that could create a realistic aged version of the test subjects with typical signs of aging such as age spots, gray hair and wrinkles.

With virtual reality, the subjects were given a kind of avatar of their ‘current self’ and their ‘older self’, which they could then meet in a virtual mirror.

The future is less abstract

One group of participants saw their current selves in the virtual mirror and another group their future selves. Then all subjects had to answer a series of questions, one of which was what they would do if they were given $1,000 immediately.

This showed an interesting and very clear difference. The subjects who had interacted with the future version of themselves were significantly more likely to save the money than the subjects who had come face to face with their current selves. Apparently seeing yourself in an older version makes the future less abstract and more concrete.

In a similar study conducted on a group of working people, Hal Hershfield and his research team asked how much everyone was willing to put aside for their old age. The people who were shown an image of their current selves would put aside two percent of their salary. The subjects who saw a manipulated photo of themselves as an older person would put aside six percent of their salary.