MANY PARTS OF THE WORLD SUFFER from ‘savings gaps,’ whereby citizens fail to save at the rate required to produce a well-funded retirement. Research indicates that one psychological barrier impeding saving behaviour is the inability to fully empathize with one’s future self. ‘Future-self interventions’ have been shown to improve savings by helping subjects overcome this obstacle. Despite the promise of such interventions, this research has focused predominantly on hypothetical contexts and western settings where the target sample has been predominantly undergraduate students.
In a recent paper with (UCLA), (University of Chicago) and , we set out to answer the following question: Would interventions that encourage people to concretely consider their future self have the same positive effect in a real-world setting? First, a bit
