You 2.0: Your Future Is Now

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In Greek mythology, the sirens were alluring sea creatures who sang beautiful and beguiling songs. Sailors lured by these sirens found themselves running aground on rocks and capsizing. It's the origin of the phrase, siren song, to describe a temptation that conceals danger. According to Greek mythology, the Warrior, Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the sirens, but feared he would lose control of his faculties and run his ship aground. So he had his men bind him to the mast of his own ship. When he heard the song of the sirens, the ropes constrained him from giving into temptation.

In modern times, social scientists and lawyers design what are sometimes known as Ulysses pacts or Ulysses contracts. Exactly as in the myth, these are ways you can limit what you yourself can do in the future if you feel you are likely to make mistakes. If you fear you are at risk for dementia, for example, you can sign over power of attorney to a relative to keep yourself from making poor decisions in the years to come. States and nations sometimes pass laws to constrain themselves from overspending future budgets. When you skip buying chips and soda at the grocery store because you worry you will give into temptation if you keep junk food at home, you are crafting a soft version of a Ulysses pact with yourself. You are constraining what you will do in the future.

Today, in the next installment of our You 2.0 series, we will explore new research into how to become a better designer of your future self. How to craft choices that will make for better tomorrows. This week on Hidden Brain.

In 2003, Washington Mutual Bank introduced a new ad campaign titled, The Power of Yes.

WaMu ad:

The Uncertainty of Getting a Home Loan made Paul irritable. Then he went to Washington Mutual. Thanks to their flexible lending rules. Paul got a quick approval. Now he's always in a great mood

Shankar Vedantam:

The Power of Yes was more than just an advertising slogan. It was an operating principle for the bank, which began saying yes and giving loans to most everyone who applied. Former employees at WaMu, as the bank was known, have said that higher ups started pushing agents to grant loans regardless of customers' income or assets. One would be borrower told the bank he was making six figures as a mariachi singer. WaMu's loan officer could not verify the singer's income, so he had the singer photographed while dressed in his mariachi outfit. The picture became part of the customer's application and the bank gave his loan a thumbs up.

Kirsten Grind:

So these loan officers, they frequently knew that they were making mortgages to people who had no chance of paying them back at all

Shankar Vedantam:

That's Kirsten Grind, Wall Street Journal reporter and author of the book, the Lost Bank.

Kirsten Grind:

It is not an exaggeration when I say that literally dead people were getting mortgages

Shankar Vedantam:

A major reality check arrived in 2008 when borrowers started defaulting on their mortgages and housing prices began to crash. Washington Mutual Bank collapsed.

News Story - NPR:

It's being called the biggest bank failure in US history. Seattle-based savings and Loan, Washington Mutual had suffered big losses selling risky mortgages to home buyers

Shankar Vedantam:

In a Senate hearing, Michigan Senator, Carl Levin, criticized the bank's leadership

Carl Levin:

Because volume and speed were king, loan quality fell by the wayside and WaMu churned out more and more loans that were high risk and poor quality

Shankar Vedantam:

The ill-considered loans approved by Washington Mutual and other banks, played a big role in the financial crisis that rocked the global economy and contributed to what has been called the Great Recession. Looking back at this chapter in recent history, we might ask what prompted so many people to act in such a shortsighted way? Was it stupidity, greed? At UCLA, psychologist Hal Hershfield agrees that those were factors, but he says there was also a psychological factor at play, a psychological factor that affects all of us all the time.

Hal Hershfield:

There's a problem on so many different levels. Washington Mutual is answering to shareholders and to Wall Street to some degree, and then that means that employees are answering to executives who are saying, push out more and more loans. We need to have more and more revenue. Part of the problem here was almost a failure to see the end of this. There's just no way that it could be sustainable to constantly be making these massive loans to people who had no means to pay for them. And I think there is this pervasive sense in this example, and it's an extreme one, that these consequences are never going to come

Shankar Vedantam:

Can you talk a moment about how, even though this might be an outlier, the larger principle at play here, which is that we are undercounting, undervaluing what's going to happen in the future in order to get what we want in the present? This is really something of a pervasive problem across all of human nature.

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah, that's right. Economists and psychologists call this temporal discounting, which is a fancy term to basically say that we discount the value of future rewards relative to present ones. So if I have an option for something right now and I can get it, but I may end up suffering later on, I may be oriented to just say, yeah, I'll go for it. You can see this when it comes to overspending versus saving or exercising versus sitting on the couch and overeating versus eating a healthier, more modest portion. These sorts of things end up being pervasive problems

Shankar Vedantam:

You say that many of our problems flow from a disjunction between our present selves and our future selves. And you experienced one version of this when you signed up for a very difficult neuroanatomy class during grad school. Tell me the story of what happened, Hal.

Hal Hershfield:

Sure. So I was at this period of time where I'd taken my required courses and I still had some space in my schedule and I could take whatever I wanted. And I said, "You know what'd be really interesting is to take this neuroanatomy class at the med school." And I got there and realized quickly like, oh, this is definitely far beyond the level that I need to know, but I still thought I'll sit in it, but let me just make sure that I take this as a pass/fail class

Shankar Vedantam:

All that Hal had to do was file a request with the registrar. Instead of getting a letter grade, he would only aim for a passing grade. He told himself he'd file the request soon, but each day he found he was busy and would put off the chore to the following day.

Hal Hershfield:

I have to say, I kept sort of pushing it off and then the end of the quarter came and there was going to be this really intense final exam and I said, okay, well, I'm taking the class pass/fail. I will study for it because I want to pass, but I'm not going to study for it to such a degree that I will necessarily get an A. I wanted to be sort of mindful of my time. So I study, study, study. I take the exam and I have this distinct memory where it's the day that I've taken the exam. I think we might've gone out to dinner that night. I go to bed, I wake up in the middle of the night and I have this sudden question hanging over me, which is, oh my gosh, did I remember to switch the pass/fail?

And I checked the next morning and sure enough, I am still signed up for a letter grade. Well, I didn't even know the grade I got, but I emailed the professor and I said, "Please, I meant to do this. I meant to make it pass/fail." And he said, "There's nothing I can do, but the registrar is in control here." And Shankar, I'll never forget the registrar's name. It was the most perfect name. It was Roger Printup, which for someone who deals with paperwork all day. And I send this desperate plea to him and to his credit, he writes back and says, "This is a very difficult case, but we have a hard and fast rule of not changing the letter grade versus pass/fail status after the deadline."

Shankar Vedantam:

Hal scraped through, but got a terrible grade. His procrastination when it came to filing the request with the registrar had cost him dearly. Looking back, Hal thinks this example illustrates one way in which we fail to do well by our future selves. We imagine our future selves will be different from our current selves in some convenient way. Hal told himself, I'm busy so I'll put off this chore until tomorrow. Of course, when the next day rolled around, Hal was just as busy. Another way we do a disservice to our future selves is that we prioritize the concerns of the present and disregard the consequences. Hal cites another example from his own life.

Hal Hershfield:

This is about, oh, 12 years ago or so. My wife and I were living apart and we knew it was going to be about two years. She was in Chicago, I was in New York, and the way that we worked things out was that during the week we were in our separate jobs and cities and then we would try our very best to see each other on weekends. But what that meant was I was trying to work as efficiently and smartly as I could during the week.

So one of the things that I tried to save time on was cooking or rather not cooking. Now where I lived in the city, there were lots of these little sort of convenience stores, which also had sort of hot prepared food in the back of the store. And there was one right across from my office and I would go in there and sort of load up and it was by weight. And I sort of said, ah, I'm just going to get as much as I can to... Looking back, I can't say it was the healthiest stuff. And this was my routine for a while. And then I went in for my annual physical. I was in my early thirties at the time. I went in for my annual physical and my doctor said, "I looked at your numbers and I think it's time we put you on statins for your very high cholesterol." And I said, "Wait, what?"

Shankar Vedantam:

But on each given day when you were busy, it did make sense in some ways to basically say, I'm busy, I'm hungry. I'm just going to pick up some food. I'm not going to think about it. And of course, what you're not doing in that moment is asking what's going to happen six months from now when I'm in the doctor's office.

Hal Hershfield:

In a way, it was as if I was separating out each present day from the days that followed. Today I can do this. Looking back, it was almost as if I didn't see how all those different meals and all those different days could add up to create a much more problematic whole

Shankar Vedantam:

A third way in which we do a disservice to our future selves is through what you call a failure of imagination. We find it hard to imagine that our future selves will want different things than we want. You experienced this after you moved from New York to Los Angeles and went house hunting with your wife. Tell me the story of what happened.

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah, sure. So we had been living in New York at the time and we were in a small New York apartment and we got out to Los Angeles and we were looking for a place to live. And when we looked for what mattered to us, we said We want it to be walkable and I want to be near coffee shops and I want to be near some bars. I was essentially trying to recreate the exact experience we had in New York out in Los Angeles. And we were really fortunate to find something, and it was in a neighborhood that seemed fun to us. The house seemed big. In some ways, I think it was big compared to our small New York apartment. And about a year later, my wife became pregnant with our first kid. And quickly those things that seem to be really important, the distance to bars and coffee shops weren't quite as relevant

Shankar Vedantam:

And in some ways the transition to parenthood is an extraordinary transition. And perhaps it's especially hard for us to imagine when we are single and childless what it's like to be married with children. That is a big transition. But the same phenomenon plays out in lots of other ways, which is, it's very hard sometimes to imagine that 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we will want different things. There's research by Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson and Jordi Quoidbach that basically shows that at every life stage people believe that they are now baked, that they're not going to change very much in the future. And of course they do change.

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah, it's one of my favorite psychological effects. They call it the “end of history illusion.” And it's essentially suggesting that we recognize that we've changed from the past to the present. And although we assume that we will change a little bit from now to the future, we think that, as they say, the rate of progress somehow will slow down, that we are who we are now. And I find this to be a really interesting mistake of sorts because when making decisions, thinking about, say, moving and being childless and married, to now having kids, we mistakenly think that our present day circumstances may end up being relatively similar and stable from now until the end of time. And that's just not true

Shankar Vedantam:

From Greek mythology to modern day Greek tragedies like Washington Mutual, human beings struggle every day to make good choices for their future selves. When we make bad decisions, we often assume that we are being shortsighted or giving in too easily to temptations. When we come back, Hal discovers a much more interesting reason why many of us fail to do right by our future selves and how we can do better. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Hal Hershfield is a psychologist at UCLA. He studies our relationship to our future selves, the people we are going to become. Hal, early in your career you conducted research involving FMRI machines to scan the brains of volunteers. Tell me how that experiment was set up and what it revealed.

Hal Hershfield:

So what we were doing in this particular study was having people make judgements as they thought about themselves now or themselves in the future or another person now or another person in the future, and what we found was that the brain activity that arose when people thought about their future selves on average looked more similar to the activity that arose when people thought about others. It's almost as if on a brain level, the future self looked like another person

Shankar Vedantam:

So that's interesting because of course at an intuitive level, all of us imagined that the people we are going to be in 30 years, we are still going to say, I'm still going to be Shankar and you are still going to be Hal. But you're saying in the brain, they seem so distant and so far away from us that they seem literally different people.

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah, I think on the surface, if you were to ask people, will you still be you? And are you still the same you as you were when you were eight or nine? I think on the surface say, "Yeah, yeah, I'm still Hal. I still have my same first name. I still have some of the same friends," and so on. But then you start really getting down to a deeper level and I'm not so sure that that answer is still true. I've moved. Your last name might change, your hair color might change, your preferences, your likes, your dislikes, these things may change as well. And so on some level it may be understandable that our future selves look almost as if they are other people

Shankar Vedantam:

So other lines of research have confirmed this finding. Tell me about the study conducted by Emily Pronin and Lee Ross.

Hal Hershfield:

So Emily Pronin and Lee Ross did this really interesting study where they went to college students and they had them write about a meal that they were currently eating. And when they did so they were likely to sort of describe it as the meal was laid out in front of them, they were likely to use the first person perspective. Now they had a different group of college students write about a meal that they would eat in the very distant future, which to college students is somewhere over the age of 40, I believe. And this group of students was considerably more likely to adopt the third person perspective. That is they would see their future self as if it was another person in the scene. It was almost as if they were using an observer's perspective

Shankar Vedantam:

So it's almost as if when people act in shortsighted ways, when they fail to plan ahead, we conclude they are poor planners or lack self-control. But your research and this work by Emily and by Lee almost seems to be hinting at a different conclusion.

Hal Hershfield:

I think if we start to think about how we relate to our future selves as if there are other people, then it can start to shed some light why we sometimes act in these ways that may seem shortsighted. I mean, think about it this way. How do we treat strangers in our lives? If a stranger or you know what, even if a coworker who I barely know, if they came up to me and asked me for help, I don't know, moving this weekend, I'd probably come up with a lot of reasons why I wouldn't be able to help them. And it's not because I'm selfish, but I do consider my own sort of self-interest. It doesn't really make sense for me to do that. Well, if my future self is like that coworker I don't know, or that sort of complete stranger on the street, in a way it's almost rational to prioritize today over tomorrow. It's like the consequences of my actions aren't really going to happen to me. They're going to happen to some other guy, some guy I barely know

Shankar Vedantam:

So in other words, why act in an ethical way? Why follow the law when the punishment for any infractions will be endured by somebody else? Why pass up on the extra slice of chocolate when the pounds will show up on somebody else's waistline? Why save for retirement instead of spending it now? You're basically giving away money to a stranger.

Hal Hershfield:

Exactly. And I mean to some extent, this is an analogy. We don't turn into literally another person when we become our future selves. But it's an analogy that's really powerful because as you said, these decisions I'm making right now will have consequences, but it's easy to write off those consequences if they're going to occur to somebody I barely am connected to

Shankar Vedantam:

So your research has found that the more our perception of our future selves resembles our perception of strangers, the more likely we are to engage in what you have called temporal discounting, prioritizing the present over the future. Talk about that research, Hal.

Hal Hershfield:

Sure. So I think it's important to recognize that we're not always selfish. We're not always self-interested, right? If one of my best friends asked me for help this weekend, or if my kid did, or my spouse or my closest family members, I probably would figure out how to drop the things I was going to do to help them. And the same can be said for our future selves. If we feel as if they are strangers, if we feel as if we are not particularly connected to them on an emotional level, then we will probably be more likely to engage in these sort of temporal discounting-like behaviors

Shankar Vedantam:

So what I find really interesting about what you said, Hal, is that it suggests that if we could build a warmer and closer relationship with our future selves, if we come to think of our future selves the way we think about a beloved child or a spouse or a close friend, we might have a very different relationship to what we are doing in the here and now.

Hal Hershfield:

That's right. It's really in some ways about injecting a sense of empathy into the relationships that we have with these distant versions of ourselves. And we have found that people who have more of this sense of connection, more of a feeling of overlap with their future selves are more likely to engage in these sorts of behaviors that will benefit them over time. But both now and in the future

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the really interesting and practical ways that you have found that we can build a warmer closer relationship with our future self has to do with photography. What is the idea, Hal?

Hal Hershfield:

So early on, my collaborators and I were trying to figure out, well, how do we get people to feel more of a sense of connection to their own future selves? It's not an easy thing to do. It's almost like saying, how can I get you to feel more of a sense of connection to someone you don't really know? Here's one thing we do know. If I can make some sort of target person more vivid and more emotional, say the recipient of charity, well then you're going to be more likely to make a donation. And so we wanted to show people what they might look like in the future.

And so, one of our studies, we put people into a virtual reality room in fact, and they had these goggles on and they would walk around the room and they would come face to face with a virtual mirror and then staring back at them in that virtual mirror was either a digitally altered image of their future self or a digital image of their current self. Now in that first sort of foray at this, we found that the people who were exposed to these age progressed images intended to save more for the long run. They said they wanted to save more

Shankar Vedantam:

So in some ways, making the future self more vivid, more clear is one way to build a closer relationship with the future self?

Hal Hershfield:

That's exactly right. Part of what we're trying to do here is really turn up the dial on identifiability and vividness. If I can get you to really vividly think about your future self and I can get you to identify with that person, well now all of a sudden it's much easier to start saying the things that I'm doing right now are going to impact not just some sort of perfectly abstract stranger, but somebody who may share things in common with me, somebody who may have some of the same feelings as me, and that can then in turn make it likely that we'll do things that will benefit them

Shankar Vedantam:

So you and other researchers have found that viewing age progressed images can have other solitary effects as well. The behavioral scientist, Tamara Sims, showed age progressed images to a group of community college students. What was the result, Hal?

Hal Hershfield:

Sure. So Tamara Sims and her collaborators, they did this really interesting study where they worked with community college students. This was over a semester long course. And every few weeks the students would be shown an image while they were doing these sort of check-in surveys, and half of them got these digitally altered images. It was just a picture of their current self that sort of digitized. The other half got age-progressed images. And what Tamara and her collaborators found was that by the end of the semester, the students who were shown the age progressed images had a higher motivation to learn about finances, and they also showed higher scores on financial knowledge or what researchers call financial literacy. They started understanding the concepts of financial decisions a little bit better

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering if the same idea can be used to help people exercise more. So for example, if I think of myself as being an older person and perhaps a little more frail, could that motivate me to do a few more healthy things today so that I can be fitter as I get older?

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah, I mean there is some other work. Sarah Raposo and Laura Carstensen have work in progress where they essentially show that when people are exposed to these age progressed images, again, they are more likely to have self-reported exercising. I think part of what's happening here is that you are making salient this future version of yourself who will benefit from the exercise right now. It sort of helps people step outside of the current moment

Shankar Vedantam:

So far, we've looked at different ways in which you can make your future self more vivid. The more we interact with our future self as an extension of ourselves, the better decisions we can make. Researchers have found another method for increasing our sense of closeness to our future selves. Writing letters.

Hal Hershfield:

Some work has found that if we engage in these sorts of conversations with our future selves, it can really enhance the bond that we have with them. So Anne Wilson and Yuta Chishima, for instance, had high school students write a letter to their future selves, but then also write a letter back from their future selves. And they found that that exercise, that conversation really dialed up the sense of connection and "continuity" that these students felt with their future selves. I think part of what's happening here is the exercise forces you to really step into the shoes of your future selves and see the world through their eyes, feel their feelings. So relative to just writing a letter to their future selves, this sort of back and forth exercise made students feel more willing to engage in career planning, more willing to delay gratification in order to achieve more academic success and so on, things that would in theory put them in a better place in the future

Shankar Vedantam:

It is one thing to feel a connection with your future self. Hal says it's even better if you can feel a sense of responsibility for your future self.

Hal Hershfield:

Chris Brian and I ran this project where we worked with university employees and we gave them different retirement saving appeals. So one group got this message that said, "Save for retirement, save for your future self. It's in your best self-interest to do so." The other group got a message that said, "You have a sense of responsibility toward your future self. Save for retirement." So everybody gets kind of the same message. But the difference here is that one message is framed as a sense of responsibility, the types of feelings that we do have for our kids or our loved ones, our close friends.

Now what we found is that that responsibility appeal where the future self is this other person, but another person who we have this sense of responsibility toward, that one caused people to actually save more. But in particular, it worked particularly well for people who already said they felt a sense of connection toward their future self. So I think this is a really interesting wrinkle here. If I just get you a simple message to try to take care of your future self, but you otherwise don't care about them, that message may fall on deaf ears. It's sort of like asking you to donate to a charity that you have no connection to. But if I can first understand your level of connection and maybe even first dial that up, then that sense of responsibility message will matter

Shankar Vedantam:

I mean, I don't want to stretch this analogy too far, but in some ways what you're really painting here is a picture of how we form connections with other people. I mean, think about how we make friends in general. You get to know someone and then you see their face and maybe you write them a letter and maybe they write you back a letter and then you'll do things together and then you have a sense of connection with them and then maybe eventually a sense of responsibility to them. And all of these things in some way stack one on top of the other. And when you get all of those things, that's when you have the very powerful bonds between parent and child or between romantic partners or between friends who are very close to one another. And what you're saying is that you can stack the same kind of relationship components to build deep connections with our future selves.

Hal Hershfield:

I think that's exactly right. And you're right, the analogy can only go so far. I once had somebody ask me, "Well, can you marry your future self?" Well, you can't do that

Shankar Vedantam:

The answer is no.

Hal Hershfield:

The answer is no. But as an analogy, it's exactly right. And we can change the level of connection that we have to people, essentially deepening that connection. And I view a lot of this work in the space of current and future selves as doing something similar, trying to really dial up that connection that people have to their future selves

Shankar Vedantam:

We've seen how making our future selves seem less like strangers and more like friends can help us plan better. When we come back, how to make it easier for our current selves to sacrifice for the people we'll become in the future. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. UCLA psychologist, Hal Hershfield, is the author of the book, Your Future Self, How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. He has studied the methods we can use to cultivate a closer warmer relationship with our future selves. Hal, one of the challenges of seeing our future selves as a friend, a friend that we should care about is that all the hard work only seems to go in one direction. Our future friends don't make sacrifices for us, but we need to make a ton of sacrifices for them. Now, of course, this is simply because time runs forwards, not backwards. We grow into our future selves. Our future selves don't grow into us, but one way to mitigate the sense that this is a one-way relationship is to reduce the pain we feel when we make sacrifices in the present for our future selves. You say that we should pay attention to the language we use by breaking sacrifices into smaller units. Give me an example of how this works.

Hal Hershfield:

So you're absolutely right. In some ways, this relationship, it's like a bad relationship where you are always sacrificing for your partner and they're doing nothing for you.

So you're right, part of the job here is to figure out how do we make those present day sacrifices feel psychologically easier to undertake? And I think the framing of them matters here. So in one project that I conducted with Shlomo Benartzi and Steve Shu, we worked with a FinTech company savings app, Acorns, and everybody who signs up during this period of time that we're running this project are given the opportunity to sign up for an automatic savings account. Now, for some of them, we ask, do you want to sign up for this savings account? It's 150 bucks a month that you can save. It'll come out every month. Now, another group, we ask if you want to save five bucks a day. Now this is the same exact amount, right?

Shankar Vedantam:

Right. Five bucks a day times 30 days is 150 bucks a month.

Hal Hershfield:

Exactly, exactly. If anything, by the way, annually, because there's different days in the month, annually it's five bucks a day is a little bit more. But what's interesting about this from my perspective is that it's the same thing, but $5 a day, it just feels a little bit easier. It doesn't feel like such a big sacrifice. And I know that it can be for some people, but for a lot of people it's relatively easy to think about something I'll give up, that's five bucks a day. It's a lot harder to think about something that I spend $150 a month on and giving that up. It's like there's only a few things that fall under that category. Now what we found was that about 7% of people sign up when it's $150 a month, but 30% sign up when it's $5 a day

Shankar Vedantam:

Four times as many?

Hal Hershfield:

Four times as many. Now, I mean, these are big numbers and we've got to remember, these are folks who already are in a savings app, so they're already sort of warm leads. You wouldn't expect 7%. Even that's great, but the difference was almost surprising to us. That's a 4X difference there

Shankar Vedantam:

Why is it that $5 a day feels so much more manageable to us than $150 a month? One possibility is that it's because we struggle to think about time and especially chunks of time in a systematic way. The researchers, Neil Lewis Jr. And Daphna Oyserman once explored this possibility in a study that tried to get people to focus on retirement goals that were three decades into the future.

Hal Hershfield:

They asked people to think about retirement, it's coming in about 11,000 days. Or think about retirement. It's going to be in about 30 years. You have to get people who are relatively the same age to do this. It's interesting. It's the same framing, but days feel short and years feel long. And what happened here is when the event in the future was framed in terms of days until the event, it felt like it was happening sooner, it felt like it was closer. Those days seemed to tick by faster compared to when it was framed as years in the future, and that had an impact on people's motivation. Folks who got that sort of day framing said that they would start planning for retirement about four times sooner than the folks who got the year framing

Shankar Vedantam:

So I mean, of course at a mathematical level, 10,950 days is the same as 30 years, and you might actually think that the bigger number would dissuade people more because that seems like a bigger number. It's further away, but in some ways, people pay more attention to the days and the years than they do to the number preceding the days and the years.

Hal Hershfield:

I think that's exactly right. I have a very good sense of how long a day feels. It's pretty short relative to a year. And 30 years, that feels like a lot. I mean, 10,950 days also feels like a lot, but it's a little more vivid. I can picture those days faster, and that brings that event closer to me, subjectively speaking

Shankar Vedantam:

There's another neat trick that the economist Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler have devised. They call it Automatic Escalation.

Hal Hershfield:

The idea is that let's say I'm saving at three or 4% of my paycheck right now. I will commit that my contribution level will automatically increase in the future, and not just in the future, but in conjunction with say, raises that I'm going to get. The brilliance here is that if I say, okay, let's bump up from four to 4.5% at the same time that I get a raise, it's not going to feel that painful to that future version of me. And also, there's something that's really smart about this because I'm committing some future guy, future me

Shankar Vedantam:

Right. It's his problem, not my problem.

Hal Hershfield:

Exactly

Shankar Vedantam:

Yeah. And part of what I think is really interesting about this is that we are often not very mindful of what's going to happen in the future as we've been discussing. And in some ways, this is harnessing the fact that we're not very mindful about what's happening in the future to actually pay more attention to our future selves. It's kind of genius.

Hal Hershfield:

Absolutely. The genius of this is it almost takes one of our "time traveling mistakes," so not really pay attention to our future selves, their interests, and rather than change it, harness it to get people to do things that will in fact help those future selves by increasing savings contributions

Shankar Vedantam:

Now, a stronger version of this kind of future contract is to add some accountability to the mix to become accountable to someone else to keep our commitments. I understand that a friend of yours has a clever way of keeping himself accountable for what he eats. What does he do, Hal?

Hal Hershfield:

One of my friends, I remember this really well, because he's not one of those folks who takes pictures of his food. I'm sure everybody has those people in their lives. My friend, Craig, is just not that guy. And one day I was at lunch with him and I noticed him taking pictures of his food and I thought, what's going on here? By the way, it wasn't like a particularly beautiful meal. It was just like a sandwich from the work, the little cafe here. And he said, "Oh, I'm working with this nutritionist and she has me sending photos of everything that I'm eating." And one of the things that he had said to me, it's really funny, he felt like he didn't want to sort of mess up and eat something unhealthy because he didn't want to let down this person. By the way, she didn't even live in the US. It's not like she could hold any sway over him

Shankar Vedantam:

And probably wasn't even looking at the pictures.

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah. Exactly, right? But I do remember that one day I said, "There's a bag of peanuts on your lap there." He said, "Oh, oh, oh, I forgot. I meant to put that..."

Shankar Vedantam:

Some cheating might actually help us keep our resolutions. There's research on that front too.

Hal Hershfield:

Exactly, exactly

Shankar Vedantam:

So there's another way of raising our commitment levels, and that is to take away the options that would tempt us from the path that we want to pursue. Tell me about the work of an entrepreneur who came up with an invention that involved a lockbox.

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah. Dave Krippendorf. He was a MIT grad student, and he lived right near Whole Foods, and every time he found himself having difficulty with a problem set, he'd walk across the street and grab a snack. Of course, these aren't cheap, and so he is finding himself kind of hurting on two fronts. He is paying more money and he is snacking too much. And he said, I've got to come up with a solution here. And he starts talking to folks and he creates this little lockbox that he puts in the kitchen. He calls it the Kitchen Safe, and it's basically a little box and it's got a digital timer with a lock on it, and it can go anywhere from a minute to 10 days, and he can throw his snacks in there and lock it up. Well, some of his friends start getting ahold of this and he likes it, and he ends up going on Shark Tank and wins a whole bunch of money and leaves his high paying post MIT business school job to really go full on in this entrepreneurial endeavor.

But what was so interesting about this is that he finds from the users of this kitchen safe that they're using it for all sorts of things. They're locking away not just snacks and food, but drugs and alcohol and prescription medication that you can only take at a certain number of hours and so on and so on. And so he changes the name to the K Safe. What's great about this is that he's essentially creating a device that makes it easy for us to commit to a certain course of action by automatically taking away that temptation, by taking away the thing that we are worried we are going to mess up on

Shankar Vedantam:

There's one final step in hardening our commitments, and that is to add consequences for violating our resolutions. And one way to do that is to pit different drives in the mind against each other, as we've discussed earlier. You cite one technique that pits our desire to give into temptations against our desire to avoid losing things. It's called burn or burn. How does it work, Hal?

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah, Nir Eyal has this great idea, which is that he knows he wants to burn calories every day, but he also knows that he may be tempted to not do it on his dresser. He has a $100 bill and he has a lighter, and he's tacked that bill up to a corkboard and he calls it the Burn or Burn Technique. And the idea is that if he doesn't burn calories in some way that day, he's got to burn the hundred dollar bill. And it's really an interesting strategy because you're injecting a sort of punishment for a future version of yourself if you mess up something. So it can kind of help create a sense of guardrails. I don't want to deviate from my plan because if I do, I know I'm going to get punished. Now, in that particular case, it requires an extra dose of self-control because now I have to actually follow through with it. That can be hard to do

Shankar Vedantam:

In an early episode of Hidden Brain, Hal, I was trying to get a colleague of mine to quit smoking, and so I asked him to make a commitment to quit and added a very painful punishment, which is if he started smoking again, he would have to donate money to an organization he detested. And this idea of course came from the platform stickk.com. It's spelled Stickk.com, which helps people stay bound to their commitments. What does the data show about the effectiveness of programs like Stickk?

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah, so recent research led by Craig Brimhall has found that people who sign up with a punishment attached, and you don't have to add a punishment, but if you do, the people who add in the punishment are four times as likely to follow through with their commitments compared to the people who don't add that punishment in

Shankar Vedantam:

That's remarkable.

Hal Hershfield:

Yeah, I mean, it is remarkable and it makes sense because I really don't want to lose out and I don't want to suffer the punishment, especially when I know that the person who deserves the blame is essentially me

Shankar Vedantam:

So we've talked at length today, Hal, about ways in which we can avoid prioritizing our present selves over our future selves, but some of us can also tip over in the other direction and start to prioritize our future selves over our present selves exclusively. And of course, that can mean that we lose out on enjoyable things in the here and now. Can you talk about that risk, Hal?

Hal Hershfield:

Sure. So, so much of my own career has been focused on myopia or being tunnel focused on the present so that we ignore the future, but there's this other sort of type of bias that we have that's called hyperopia, where we're almost too focused on the future and end up ignoring the present. Here's a great example of it. It comes from work by Suzanne Shu. If you've ever had a gift certificate to a restaurant and you said, okay, yeah, I'm going to wait for the perfect time to use that gift certificate, and then the restaurant closes, in some ways, this is hyperopic. You have been so focused on doing something right in the future that you forget that it may make more sense to just do that thing now. Here's the irony here. This is another mistake where even though we think we're doing something for the future, waiting for the perfect moment, we end up making life worse for our future selves because now they haven't had that experience. We've also made life worse for our present selves because we haven't had that experience

Shankar Vedantam:

One idea that follows from this, Hal, is that living a successful and happy life involves seeing the big picture, not just prioritizing the needs of the present self and not just prioritizing the needs of the future self. You call this taking a bird's eye view of time, and I feel like we're almost in the realm of philosophy now, not just psychology, but can you tell me what you mean by that and whether you are able to successfully apply that idea in your own life?

Hal Hershfield:

So Cassie Mogilner Holmes, Jennifer Aaker, and I have been theorizing and thinking about this for years now, and that idea here is that we are often confronted with these moments where we say, should I do this thing or not? Should I spend or should I save? We force ourselves to ask these sort of “whether” questions, whether I should do something or not. Our suspicion is that the bird's eye view of time changes that weather frame into a when frame so that we can start thinking, when should I do something and when should I not do something? When does that vacation make sense? And when does it make sense to save?

In my own life, I've applied this sort of thinking, not just to how I spend and save, but also how I allocate time. More and more lately, especially with kids who are young, I've been thinking about when it makes sense to travel for work or not, and when it makes sense to be fully present at home and when it doesn't. Because ultimately, when I sort of step back and I look down at my life and the way I imagine I'll look down on it much later on, I think I'm going to want to be satisfied with how I've spent my time and not regret it

Shankar Vedantam:

Hal Hershfield is a psychologist at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He's the author of Your Future Self, How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. Hal, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Hal Hershfield:

Thank you so much for having me

Shankar Vedantam:

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

Our unsung hero this week is Stacy Bond. Stacy works on the editorial team at Apple Podcasts, and she's been an excellent partner as we've launched our new podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. Stacy has great curatorial instincts and is really committed to making sure that podcast listeners are exposed to great shows. She's been a big help in brainstorming ways to bring Hidden Brain Plus to larger audiences, and we are truly grateful for her creativity and attention to detail. Thank you, Stacy. If you haven't yet tried out Hidden Brain Plus, we hope you'll give it a try. In our most recent episode, we explore how to navigate sensitive and difficult conversations.

Sheila Heen:

"I need somebody to get it. I need somebody to understand and to walk alongside me through some hard stuff," I think is really at the heart of so many difficult conversations in our lives

Shankar Vedantam:

You can find Hidden Brain Plus in the Apple Podcasts app or at apple.co/hiddenbrain. Next week in our You 2.0 series, we explore how to master the art of slowing down and savoring our lives. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.