Future Shock: Behavioral Science Turns Spenders into Savers

May 3, 2011 Heather Belli Posted in Articles

How Behavioral Science is Turning Spenders into Savers

Jason Zweig has written a really interesting article on why it is so difficult for people to set aside money for the long-term future. Stanford and other university economists, neuroscientists and psychologists are working on innovative ways to address this problem. One fascinating experiment creates an avatar (digital self-image) of individuals using software to "age-morph" a recent photograph. In one experiment young people who saw their elderly avatars indicated they would save twice as much as subjects that had not had a glimpse of their future self. Read the entire articleArticle Link