Researchers have found a simple trick that can help you save money and break bad habits: change the way you imagine your future self.
When traveling through time in their mind, people tend to start with the present and move forward, mentally mapping out the subsequent months and years. But new U of T research finds people feel more connected to their future selves, and are more likely to do things that benefit their futures, if they flip that — by first imagining their future life and then moving back to the present.
“Regardless of how many years into the future you go, we see a consistent effect,” says Sam Maglio, study co-author and professor of marketing in the department of management at U of T Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management.
“Whether you want to save over 30 years for retirement or one year for a vacation, starting in the future and rewinding back works better to help you get there.”
All it took was the swap of a few words; in a study carried out in 2019, users of a Swedish investment app were sent one of two messages, one being: “The year is 2019. Move forward to 2029. Save for 2029 you!” Users were more likely to actually deposit money in long-term savings products if they got the other message that read: “The year is 2029. Rewind back to 2019. Save for 2029 you!”
Maglio and his co-authors found the same trend in one of the 20 other studies they conducted, on people who downloaded an American college savings app. Inactive users more often finished the sign-up process, which involved entering personal information and committing to investing with the app, when they got a message asking them to mentally rewind from 2031 to 2021 and “save now for college.”
“They had to share sensitive personal data, so it's not just a matter of wanting to save. They were willing to sacrifice something in the interest of saving,” Maglio says.
Traveling from unknown to known
Across a range of studies, scenarios, and demographics, whether imagining one year, six years or 10 years into the future, people consistently felt more similar to their later selves if they mentally backtracked from future to present. Maglio says the reason this happens comes down to uncertainty.
In a 2016 study, co-authored by then-psychology undergraduate student Cherrie Kwok (HBSc 2016 UTSC), Maglio found uncertainty is what propels the “return-trip effect,” or the phenomenon wherein trips to a known destination, like driving back home, feel shorter than trips to unknown locations, even if they’re the same distance. Maglio had participants walk from one room to another to complete a menial task and discovered people believed they spent less time walking if they knew what the task would be beforehand.
Maglio and his colleagues reasoned that the same thing could happen entirely in the mind, by having people start by picturing the unknown — the future — and travel back to the known — the present. They theorized this would make a person’s mental trip across time feel faster, thus making both versions of the self feel closer together. That ultimately leads them to feel more similar.
“Reverse mental time travel could apply in plenty of other contexts, like weight loss campaigns or stop smoking campaigns. There are so many self-control problems that result from the same failure to feel connected to our future self,” Maglio says. “Why would I sacrifice in the present for the benefit of someone who seems very different from who I am?”
The research could have wide-reaching implications for a range of important decisions, such as how much money someone chooses to take out for a loan or if a retiree decides to forfeit some of their social security benefits by accessing them early.
“With this work, we have taken a first step in identifying a new way to change how people think about time, namely reverse mental time travel. Knowing that it works, our next steps are going to be on breadth. What else can this new tool do?”
This research received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.