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Future-Self Discontinuity

Why people treat their future self a bit like a stranger, and what changed it in a lab task.

Why do people treat their future self like a stranger?

In a 2009 fMRI study at Stanford, Hershfield and colleagues found that for many people, thinking about their future self looked closer to thinking about another person. In their data, people who felt more distant from their future self discounted future rewards more.

Source: Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009 (Stanford)

An example scene from a FutureSelf vision board

You don't feel like a stranger to yourself today. In a 2009 fMRI study at Stanford, Hal Hershfield and colleagues found that, for many people, thinking about their future self looked closer to thinking about a stranger than to thinking about their present self.

This is called future-self discontinuity. It is one explanation for why long-term decisions feel hard: saving money, exercising, investing in education, building relationships - all of these are essentially trades with a stranger who happens to share your name.

The Aged-Face Intervention

In Hershfield et al. (2011), people who saw an age-progressed image of their own face put more of a hypothetical budget toward retirement: $172 versus $80 of $1,000 in the virtual-reality study, and 6.2% versus 4.4% of salary in an online study using photos. (Journal of Marketing Research)

FutureSelf uses the same idea with eight photoreal scenes of your own face. The product itself has not been tested in a study.

The same idea with your own face: see how you will look in the future.

If the idea holds, long-term choices about money, health, career and relationships are partly a future-self continuity problem. The studies measured lab tasks, not daily life.

Frequently asked

How is discontinuity reduced?

The intervention with the most support is seeing a realistic image of your own future face. In Hershfield et al. (2011), participants shown age-progressed renderings of themselves allocated more to a hypothetical retirement account in a lab task than those shown their current selves.

Is this the same as low willpower?

No, and the distinction matters. Discounting a stranger's interests is a rational response to psychological distance, not a failure of discipline. That is why closing the distance works better than trying harder.

See the scenes with your own face

Make my vision boardauto_awesome

Sources

  1. Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self
    Hershfield, Goldstein, Sharpe, Fox, Yeykelis, Carstensen & Bailenson · 2011 · Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S23-S37 · doi:10.1509/jmkr.48.SPL.S23
  2. Future You: a conversation with an AI-generated future self reduces anxiety and increases future self-continuity
    Pataranutaporn, Winson, Yin, Lapapirojn, Ouppaphan, Lertsutthiwong, Maes & Hershfield · 2024 · MIT Media Lab (preprint, arXiv:2405.12514). Preregistered, N = 344

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