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On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one statement in big italic type: “My research asks, ‘How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?”

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hershfield and interviewer Dave Edmonds discuss what that means in practice, whether in our finances or our families, and how humans can make better decisions. Hershfield’s new book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today, offers a popular synthesis of these same questions.

Much of his research centers on this key observation: “humans have this unique ability to engage in what we call ‘mental time travel,’ the ability to project ourselves ahead and look back on the past and even project ourselves ahead and look back on the past while we’re doing so. But despite this ability to engage in mental time travel, we don’t always do it in a way that affords us the types of benefits that it could.”

Those benefits might include better health from future-looking medical decisions, better wealth thanks to future-looking spending and savings decisions, or greater contentment based on placing current events in a future-looking context. Which begs the question – when is the future?

 “The people who think the future starts sooner,” Hershfield explains, “are the ones who are more likely to do things for that future, which in some ways makes sense. It’s closer, it’s a little more vivid. There’s a sort of a clean break between now and it. That said, it is a pretty abstract question. And I think what you’re asking about what counts in five years, 10 years, 20 years? That’s a deeper question that also needs to be examined.”

Regardless of when someone thinks the future kicks off, people remain acutely aware that time is passing even if for many their actions belie that. Proof of this comes from studies of how individual react when made acutely aware of the advance of time, Hershfield notes. “People place special value on these milestone birthdays and almost use them as an excuse to perform sort of a meaningfulness audit. of their lives, … This is a common finding, we’ve actually found this in our research, that people are more likely to do these sorts of meaning-making activities as they confront these big milestones. But it’s also to some degree represents a break between who you are now and some future person who you will become.”

Hershfield concludes the interview noting how his research has changed him, using the example of how he now makes time when he might be doing professional work to spend with his family. “I want my future self to look back and say, ‘You were there. You were present. You saw those things,’ and not have looked up and said, ‘Shoot, I missed out on that.’ I would say that’s the main way that I’ve really started to shift my thinking from this work.”

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

TRANSCRIPT

Dave Edmonds: Do you think about what your life will be like in five, 10, 20 years? Are you good at imagining your future? Hal Hershfield is a psychologist at UCLA Anderson School of Management and has a very specific research interest. He investigates how people perceive the passage of time, how they view their future selves, and what impact this has on their decisions. Hal Hershfield, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Hal Hershfield: Thanks so much, Dave. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Edmonds: So, an unusual subject today we’re talking about time, in particular, how humans perceive themselves as changing through time, and how this shapes their decisions. So we’ll explain more about that in a moment. But perhaps you could sketch out very generally the issue at stake here, because I guess one thing that makes humans distinct as a species, is that we have a quite finely grained ability to think about both the past and the future.

Hershfield: Yeah, that’s right. So, I would say if I can sort of sketch it out briefly, humans have this unique ability to engage in what we call “mental time travel,” the ability to project ourselves ahead and look back on the past and even project ourselves ahead and look back on the past while we’re doing so. But despite this ability to engage in mental time travel, we don’t always do it in a way that affords us the types of benefits that it could. And so, a lot of my research focuses on when we make, quote unquote, mistakes with our decisions, projecting ourselves ahead in time.

Edmonds: OK, when I was 20, I don’t think I could imagine myself very clearly being my current age. And I find it tricky to imagine what I’ll be like, at night, if I survive that long, inshallah, how much do people vary in their ability to imagine their future selves?

Hershfield: Right. So there’s a good degree of variability here. Some people can really clearly imagine the person that they’ll be in five years, 10 years’ time. Some people have a very difficult time with it, vividness in the mind’s eye tends to be something that’s has a lot of individual differences. That being said, the further out we go in time, essentially everybody starts showing a weakened ability to do this, because it’s harder and harder, and there’s more uncertainty, and so on and so on.

Edmonds: So this variability, how have you established that? Have you established that some people are good at it, and some people are bad at it?

Hershfield: Right? So there are a variety of different questionnaires. Look, I’m a psychologist. So I deploy these questionnaires, we ask people about how much they feel a sense of connection with their future selves, which is a little different than sort of vividness. And we’ve used sort of pictures to do this. We show people circles that go from gradually not overlapping to almost all the way overlapping. They’re called Euler circles. That’s one way to measure how much you feel connected or similar or related to your future self. But you can also ask people, ‘How vivid does the image of your future self seem?’ you know, and this is one-to-seven scale and you continue to seven is a perfectly clear image, no problem at all. One is vague and abstract, and I can’t even conjure it up. That’s mainly the way we do it.

Edmonds: Is there any new scientific research or physiological research on this? You have conducted experiments with MRI scanners, for example?

Hershfield: Yes, to some degree. One of the studies that I’ve done, we’ve put people into MRI scanners, just as you said, and we’ve asked them to make judgments about themselves now and themselves in the future, as well as another person now and another person in the future. Now, what we find there is that the neural activity pattern that comes about when people think of their future selves, looks a lot like the neural activity pattern that comes about when people think about another person. Now that’s not quite the same as looking at vividness, right? This is just saying, the way we sort of conceptualize the future self in the mind’s eye in our brain is on par with the way that we conceptualize another person, the vividness question, though, that’s a deeper one that we haven’t yet explored, but totally worth doing.

Edmonds: Talk me through some of the implications of these findings. Suppose I’m one of those people who thinks that the person who will exist in 25 years will be very close to me. How will my behavior differ from a person who imagines their future self as someone entirely alien to them?

Hershfield: Right. So, one way to think about this, Dave, is to consider how would you treat somebody today, somebody else today who you are very close