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The Marshmallow Test Chapter 9 Your Future Self
Author: Walter Mischel Publisher: New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. Publish Date: 2014-9 Review Date: Status:💥
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Hal Hershfield, now at New York University, and his colleagues conducted this study with Stanford University undergraduates in 2009. They found that we differ not only in what we feel when we imagine our future selves but in our brain activity, depending on how closely we connect our self-perceptions and identity in the present to the selves we become. For many people, the pattern that becomes activated in the brain for the future self is more like the one for the stranger than like the one for the self. But there are individual differences, showing that some people are more emotionally in touch and identified with their future self, while for others that older person might as well be somebody else.
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How much overlap is there in the circles you selected? If you see more continuity between yourself now and yourself in the future, you probably put more value on delayed rewards and less value on immediate rewards and are less impatient than people who view their future selves as strangers. As the researchers point out, if we feel greater continuity with who we will become, we might also be willing to sacrifice more of our present pleasures for the sake of that future self.
Note: sounds pretty constraining
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The same group of researchers also looked at financial decision making in adults (mean age of 54 years) living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The participants who perceived greater rather than less overlap between their present self and their future self not only had a stronger preference for delayed larger rewards rather than immediate smaller rewards, but also accumulated more real-world assets (net worth from all sources) over time.
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MONEY NOW VERSUS 401(K) FOR THE FUTURE
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The kids in the Surprise Room had to cool down to resist taking their one marshmallow. Decades later, when making their 401(k) choices, they have to imagine themselves in old age, not abstractly but concretely, in order to heat the scene emotionally as if they were already there. While they’re still young, they have to linger on that future self—at least long enough to check the box on the 401(k) retirement form that initiates the retirement plan.
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Just as preschoolers’ willingness and ability to wait for two marshmallows depend on how they mentally represent the treats, the young adult’s ability to connect with the self expected years in the future depends on how that distant self is mentally represented. To explore this, Hershfield and his colleagues set out in one study to show a group of college students vivid representations of their retirement-aged selves while they were making financial decisions. As a first step, the researchers asked each participant for a photo of him- or herself and then created an avatar (or digital representation) out of that photo. For some of the participants, the avatar was of themselves at their present age; for others, the avatar was made to look older, representing the person at approximately age sixty-eight. Participants used a slider scale with an arrow to indicate what percent of their hypothetical paycheck they would allocate toward their 401(k) retirement account. As they moved the arrow to the left, they increased the percent they would get as take-home pay, and as they moved the arrow to the right, they increased the percent going into their retirement fund.
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Participants saw either the avatar of their current self (displayed on the left side of the slider) or the avatar of their future self (displayed on the right side of the slider). Would calling attention to the self they would become in the future influence the present self to share current income? Indeed, those who saw their future self indicated that they would save 30 percent more relative to those who saw their current self.
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The idea guiding this research is that the more emotionally connected you become to your future self, the more you will incorporate it into your present self-conception and budget, ready to share more generously from what you currently give yourself to what you allocate to yourself in the future. Hershfield and other researchers are continuing to explore whether savings for later years, not just in hypothetical lab situations but in real life—specifically in 401(k) retirement plans—might be substantially increased by enhancing the saver’s identification with the future self.
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BECOMING ETHICAL FOR THE FUTURE SELF?
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If you feel closely connected to your future self, will you be more likely to take into account how your present actions will impact how you feel later—and not just when it comes to budgets and retirement planning? Specifically, will individuals who experience close continuity with their future selves be less likely to make the unethical decisions that are all too common in everyday life? It’s a timely question, given that FBI statistics on white-collar crime, first gathered in 1940, indicate that the rate of such crime had tripled by 2009—a problem made salient by the rash of financial scandals exposed during the 2008 financial crisis, including Bernard Madoff’s monumental Ponzi scheme. In 2012, Hershfield and his colleagues asked that question in five online studies using women and men ranging in age from 18 to 72 years. The researchers inquired about their willingness to endorse unethical but profitable business decisions and their moral judgments about the acceptability of lies and bribes in business contexts. For example, how likely would the individual (always anonymous) be to market a profitable food product with known health hazards or to endorse a financially lucrative but environmentally risky mining operation that could lead to a large bonus? Across the five studies, people who felt more disconnected from their future selves—measured by little overlap in their circles for the present self and the future self—were more apt to tolerate unethical business decisions.
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The researchers also prompted some participants to think about their future selves while others were primed to think about the future world. Projecting the self into the future, compared with simply thinking about the future, reduced tolerance for unethical behavior. Those who felt closely connected to the future self thought more about the delayed long-term consequences of their actions, and it was this attention to future consequences that accounted for their unwillingness to make greedy, selfish decisions. It’s a finding to recall before the hot system, oblivious to distant consequences and blind to ethics, faces its next tantalizing but immoral temptation.