The Stranger Who Inherits the Plans

A thought says: later, I will deal with it. It sounds patient. It also sounds as if “later” were a different person with a different phone number. KTT counts that thought as a thought, noticed or not, even when it arrives as a slight relief at passing something on. Psychologists have asked how the person who makes plans pictures the person who will live them. The sources read for this article are abstracts, reviews and reference lists of four studies. None of them tested what a person’s thoughts are while deciding.

Seen as someone else

In 2006, Emily Pronin and Lee Ross reported that people think about their future selves in a more third-person way than about their present selves. In their studies, the future self was seen from the outside, as if it were another person. The paper’s title says as much: when the self is seen as an other.

What the brain did

In 2009, Hal Ersner-Hershfield, Elliott Wimmer and Brian Knutson scanned people who judged themselves now and in the future. Activity in regions linked to self-related processing was lower when people thought about their future selves. The pattern predicted how much those people discounted future rewards in a separate choice task. The more the future self looked like a stranger, the less they valued what would come to it.

How close the future self feels

Also in 2009, Ersner-Hershfield and colleagues asked people to rate how similar they felt to their future selves, using two overlapping circles. The ratings correlated with patience on a discounting task, and with assets that people had saved. A later review calls this future self-continuity and describes it as the degree of connection between the self now and the self later.

Making the stranger visible

In 2011, Hershfield and colleagues tested whether showing people an age-progressed picture of themselves changes how they save. The title of the paper reports that it increased saving behavior in their tasks. These were laboratory and online studies with small tasks. They show a link between how close the future self feels and a choice.

What is not known

Whether the thought “later me will deal with it” comes before the choice, or only explains it afterward, is not known. The studies measured ratings and choices, not thoughts.

Whether a changed picture of the future self changes real saving over years is open. The 2011 study tested short tasks.

Whether the effect looks the same across cultures is also open. The sources read here describe mostly American samples.