By Matt Johnson
On May 11th, 2011 a group of research subjects was given a simple choice: Do you want $5 now, or $500 on May 22nd, 2011?
With less than two weeks to wait, the answer seems simple: Hold off and get the $500. Easy money, right? However, the research subjects overwhelmingly chose the $5.
Why May 22nd, 2011? These particular participants were followers of Harold Camping, the self-proclaimed Doomsday Prophet. He believed, as his followers did, that The Rapture would come on May 21st, 2011. To his followers, May 22nd, 2011 may as well be May 22nd, 3011.
Believing in the apocalypse leads people to discount their futures.
It’s easy to look at this behavior as bizarre, but a wealth of research in economic decision-making reveals that this is something that each of us is naturally prone to do—even in the absence of any apocalyptic beliefs. We reliably choose immediate short-term rewards at the expense of greater long-term gains. And in the end, we sell our future selves short.
Part of this comes down to impulsivity, and the inability to resist that immediate reward. But recently, research has also revealed that there’s a social element as well: We see our future self as a distant stranger whom we care little about.
How can we connect more deeply, and thus become more invested, in the happiness of our future selves?
Affective Forecasting and the Psychology of the Future Self
Investing in our future is not something that comes naturally. For one, we’re notoriously bad at predicting how we’ll feel about something in the future. Consider the prospect of receiving free ice cream every day for 30 days straight. Daniel Kahneman provided an exploration of this exact scenario, and if you’re like the volunteers in his study, you’d have a very optimistic prediction of how happy this would make you. Everyone predicted that their enjoyment of the ice cream would grow each day, and by day 30, they would be in ice cream bliss.
Halfway through, participants were begging to drop out of the study, and those who did make it to the end felt miserable. The idea of eating ice cream every day seems great. But the actual impact on our future state of happiness? Not so much.
We’re constantly participating in affective forecasting: attempting to predict how we’ll feel in the future. And generally speaking, we’re horrible at it.
And not just for positive events either. Dan Gilbert of Harvard University has done extensive work looking at how well we can predict our feelings following a negative experience. We tend to catastrophize and overexaggerate the negative emotions we’ll feel later. In one set of experiments, he gathered data from people who had every reason to be unhappy: people who were stood up at the altar. At that moment, as expected, they’re devastated with sadness. And when asked, they predict that their future self will be even worse off a year later.
But how do these future selves actually feel? When recalled and asked this question, they are surprisingly happy. In fact, many report the event as being one of the best things that ever happened to them. We’re much more emotionally resilient than we tend to think.
All in all, we’re generally poor at predicting how events in the present will impact future happiness. How can we feel more connected with our future selves?
Future Others
We get a clue by examining a similar, and even more difficult process: empathizing with future others. It’s difficult enough to empathize with our future selves, much less with people years into the future who haven’t been born yet and whom we’ll never meet.
Creatives have often heeded this call, and have works that inspire empathy with the future. Mark Twain specifically instructed his publisher to wait until 100 years after his death to publish his autobiography. Honoring his wishes, the publishers released the book in 2010. For Twain, only the people far-off in his imagination and who he had no hope of ever knowing would enjoy this work.
More recently, as discussed in Branding That Means Business, modern brands have approached future-mindedness by creating products and campaigns associated with timelessness. Again, the century mark proves enchanting. Consider French Cognac brand Louis XIII, which is renowned for craft, history, and patience. It’s a special blend of cognac that comes from aging their brandy in oak barrels, which takes 100 years to be coaxed into excellence. In tandem with the aging process, the brand created something special to coincide with its release: a movie.
This is how the film 100 Years was born. The production followed the high standards of the brand; they enlisted the support of a star-studded, creative team that included Director Robert Rodriguez and actor John Malkovich.
The filming finished in 2015 and was subsequently stored away under strict guidelines. The completed film is placed in a custom safe at the Sheats Goldstein Mansion in Hollywood. Anticipating that some restless fans may not be willing to wait, the team took no chances, bulletproofing the safe and equipping it with a high-tech timer. The only thing that can open the safe is patience; it’s set to pop open automatically in 2115.
In contrast to Twain’s autobiography, no one involved in the creation of the film will ever see it and enjoy it. Even Rodriguez, who sent his rough edit out for visual effects to be added never saw the final cut before it went in the vault. He stated, “I’m proud of it, even though nobody I know will ever see it.”
Art then may be key to connecting with future others. But can this be used to create more empathy with our future selves?
Connecting With Future Selves
In the last decade, we’ve come to understand the mysterious process of social cognition: how our brain integrates social cues to seamlessly build models of other people’s minds. Research indicates that we employ a similar neural mechanism for thinking about our future selves as we do for thinking about other people. That is, we tend to think about our future selves as completely different people, as opposed to older versions of ourselves. And further, the better we can represent ourselves in that future, the more long-term our thinking becomes.
As author Hal Hershfield, professor of Management at UCLA, has written, “It may not be problematic to think about our future selves as if they are other people, as long as we see them as people with whom we have a close, emotionally bonded relationship — for those are the sorts of relationships that inspire us to make sacrifices.”
Research suggests that trying to connect with future selves can lead us to make better financial decisions. Recall the FaceApp craze from 2019, which allowed users to upload a picture of themselves and see what they would look like as an old person. Ethical implications of face-based marketing aside, research has indicated that technology has an unexpected benefit: financial planning. Research finds that when students were shown an artificially-aged image of themselves, it motivated them to prepare better for their long-term financial futures.
These results suggest that this visual simulation can help bridge the gap between present and future selves, leading us to be much more invested in the latter.
Final Thoughts on Affective Forecasting and the Future Self
The French philosopher Simone Weil recognized these limitations, writing that “The future is empty and is filled by our imagination. Our imagination can only picture perfection on our own scale. It is just as imperfect as we are; it does not surpass us by a single hair’s breadth.” We can never really learn from the future since it exists nowhere else but as a projection within our own, present-day minds.
Empathizing with our future self is inherently difficult, but incredibly important. Visualization may be key. While art may be a great way to connect with future others, it’s through visualizing our future selves that we gain a greater appreciation for the long-term impact of our present-day decision-making.
This article was edited by Lachezar Ivanov.
