Study • Finance · Savings

Increasing Savings Behavior Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self’.

Hershfield et al. (2011), ‘Increasing Savings Behavior Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self’, Journal of Marketing Research.

Hal Hershfield

Summary by Mark Egan

The authors, reasoning that people may fail to sufficiently identify with their future selves to encourage them to save enough for retirement, showed participants (n=50) realistic age-progressed renderings of themselves to make the need to save more salient. Participants could decide how much they wanted to save on aslider: if they indicated a low amount, they saw a age-progressed rendering of themselves frowning. If they indicated a high amount, they saw the same figure smiling. Results showed those who saw the age-progressed renderings allocated on average more than twice as much ($172 v $80) as those who saw non-ageprogressed renderings in a hypothetical account.

Tactics used

E

TACTICS

Education or Information

F

TACTICS

Feedback

E

TACTICS

Environmental Restructuring

Behaviors addressed

Savings

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