SELF AS A STRANGER
“People tend to make decisions for immediate gratification because they are treating their future self as a stranger,” he said.Mr. Ersner-Hershfield used the example of a teenage boy smoking cigarettes because he is unable to imagine realistically the effects of long-term smoking on his body.
This is the same mindset, he explained, that helps justify why half the people in the country have just $25,000 saved for retirement and why a third of them have less than $1,000 saved.
To help remedy that gross shortfall in retirement savings, Mr. Ersner-Hershfield has developed a program that creates images of what people will look like in 30 or 40 years.
While the financial services industry for years has promoted savings calculators and estimates on retirement income needs, it turns out that seeing an image of yourself at an advanced age helps make imagining getting older a reality.
In his research, Mr. Ersner-Hershfield applied aging-avatar images of individuals to their perspectives on spending and saving money.
“The more similar people felt to their self in the future, the more assets they wanted to save,” he said. “And we found that the more the future self looks like a different person, the worse we are at saving behavior.”
Mr. Ersner-Hershfield even tweaked the research to alter the expression of the avatar so that poor-savings-habit responses would cause the avatar likeness to frown.
“The objective is to give people vivid examples of their future self,” he said.
Susan Carr-Templeton, founder of Stafford Wells Advisors Ltd., tested the technology on some of her clients.
“I think it would be great for 401(k) plan participants or some young people like athletes who are making a lot of money,” she said.
The technology is at least six months from being developed for practical use, according to Mr. Ersner-Hershfield.
“We envision it starting as more of an institutional thing that starts at a company like Fidelity [Investments] or something like that,” he said.
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