'Reverse mental time travel' is a promising intervention that can alter how consumers relate to and make decisions for their present self and the self they will one day become
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Although we live in the present, as consumers, most of our spending and saving choices have time-related (‘temporal’) components to them. Because the present is immediate and the future is distant, we often discount the enjoyment that our future selves will experience, choosing to accelerate rewards to the present and delay costs to the future.
When choosing to splurge on a new pair of shoes today, not saving that money for tomorrow might seem like a small price to pay. But as tomorrows morphs into todays, consumers repeatedly eschew opportunities to save for the future. Procrastination comes all-too-easily and resisting spending inducements is difficult, which is the main reason why most consumers don’t have sufficient savings to survive even small-scale disruptions.
In 2023, the Federal Reserve found that 37 per cent of U.S. consumers would not be able to pay for an unexpected $400 expense with their savings. And in a PwC Employee Financial Wellness Survey, employees ranked ‘financial stress’ as a bigger stressor than all other life stressors combined.
To address these tendencies, we asked a novel question: Could mentally starting in the future and traveling back to the present in one’s mind alter how people think about themselves over time, thereby changing their financial decisions?
The existing research in this domain shows that decision makers mentally ‘travel through time’ in a linear fashion when making such choices, starting in the present and moving toward the future. But in a recent paper with my colleagues Katherine Christensen (University of Indiana) and Hal Hershfield (UCLA), we challenged this notion. We felt that changing the direction of mental time travel might affect the relationships of present and future selves across time—and thereby impact consumer behaviour. In this article I will summarize our findings.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]