Saving for your future self: The role of imaginary experiences

Abstract

Despite increased longevity, many people fail to save the funds necessary to support their retirement. In an attempt both to elucidate and remedy this failing, research exploring the 'futureself continuity' hypothesis has revealed that temporal discounting is decreased and saving increased when connections between one's current and future self are strengthened. Here we explored the possibility that a basic component of mental imageryspatial visual perspectivemay be an important determinant of people's decisions to spend now or save for the future. The results of two experiments supported this prediction. Rates of saving were enhanced when a distant-future event was generated from a third-person versus first-person vantage point, an effect that was mediated by visual bodily awareness during mental imagery.

Imagining Events Alternative to the Present Can Attenuate Delay Discounting

“…Activity in several nodes of the core autobiographical network, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (Burgess et al, 2003;Gilbert et al, 2006) and the posterior parietal cortex (Cabeza et al, 2008;Ciaramelli et al, 2008; see also Nyberg et al, 2010), has been conceptualized as mediating the allocation of attention to internal (vs. external) sources of information, a process inherent to memory retrieval. Directing attention away from perceptual reality towards inner, mentally constructed experience may downregulate the appraisal of immediate rewards, reducing the valuation gap normally present between immediate and future rewards, hence DD (Ballard and Knutson, 2009;Smallwood et al, 2011;Macrae et al, 2017). Consistent with this interpretation, mind-wandering, the drift of attention away from external tasks/events towards internally generated information (e.g., thoughts, memories, plans; Smallwood et al, 2011), which is characterized by reduced cortical analysis of external events (Smallwood et al, 2008;Kam et al, 2011), is also associated with low DD rates (Smallwood et al, 2013).…”

I can see myself enjoying that: Using imagery perspective to circumvent bias in self-perceptions of interest.

“…The present research contributes to a growing body of research suggesting that imagery perspective influences processing style, while also validating and further specifying the proposed nature of processing that occurs according to each imagery perspective. In particular, previous research suggests that third-person (vs. first-person) imagery facilitates a top-down processing style that helps people connect their past, present, and future selves into a coherent narrative (Libby et al, 2011;Macrae et al, 2017), thereby causing people to rely more on their self-beliefs when making judgments (Libby & Eibach, 2011;Libby et al, 2014;Marigold, et al, 2015;Niese et al, 2018;Vasquez & Buehler, 2007). The current results provide convergent evidence for this account by demonstrating how people's self-beliefs about their interest in a domain shape their recall with third-person (but not first-person) imagery.…”

Preschoolers' Saving Behavior: The Role of Planning and Self‐Control

“…Research into saving behavior has recently been situated in the contexts of “future‐self continuity” (the degree to which a person sees their current self as being connected to their future self; Ersner‐Hershfield, Garton, Ballard, Samanez‐Larkin, & Knutson, ; Macrae et al., ) and “episodic foresight” (the ability to “mentally project oneself forward in time to anticipate future events,” Atance et al., , p. 68), as the act of saving involves thinking about oneself in the future. We know from such work that the more that adults feel connected to their future selves, the greater their actual savings (Ersner‐Hershfield et al., ).…”