





Meet your older self

Me at age 29, and a projection of me at age 67, from Merrill Edge’s Face Retirement.

Computer-rendered "aged" photographs project what someone might look like several years in the future. Although they’re typically used in missing persons advertisements, these "older self" photos can really help influence people’s decisions.


Most of the time, we tend to think of our future selves more as an "other" rather than as a "self." Researchers at Princeton explored this tendency a few years ago in an experiment: They asked participants how much of a disgusting liquid they would be willing to drink for the sake of science (a delicious mixture of water, soy sauce, and ketchup).

When they asked participants how much they’d be willing to drink then and there, participants committed themselves to drinking less than a quarter-cup. Asked how much another participant in the experiment should have to drink, participants committed strangers to drinking nearly a half cup. And when people were asked how much they would commit to drinking themselves in a few months, they were much more likely to give answers closer to a half cup. Here’s what’s key: They treated strangers and their future selves quite similarly—in contrast to the way they treated their present selves.



Why aren’t we taking the future into account all the time?

What’s keeping us from thinking about our future selves more regularly, especially when we’re making decisions with long-term consequences?

Behavioral economics and cognitive psychology suggest that cognitive biases impact the way we do (or don’t) take the future into account when making decisions. Equipped with an understanding of those biases, we can begin to craft design strategies that help combat them.

First, we tend to discount future outcomes.

Life is full of decisions where one option leads to a positive outcome in the present and another option leads to an even bigger positive outcome in the future. (This is called an intertemporal choice.) Most people choose the here-and-now outcome, even if it’s orders of magnitude smaller than the future outcome. We do this because we dramatically discount outcomes that occur in the future. The farther in the future an outcome occurs, the more we discount its impact. This is known as quasi-hyperbolic time discounting.

Second, we’re pretty bad at predicting our future selves.

We’re not great at predicting what we’ll want, what we’ll feel, or how we’ll react to life-changing events down the line. These are known as affective forecasting errors. They’re attributed to biases like the projection bias (we project our current emotional states on our future selves) and the impact bias (we overestimate our emotional responses to future events, such as the death of a loved one and don’t account for how we actually cope and adapt over time).


Even when we have good intentions about the future, we easily fall victim to narrow bracketing. That means we focus on the individual outcomes of smaller decisions instead of taking a more holistic or longer-term view to understand their additive effects.

Designing with an eye toward the future


1. Help people keep their future selves in mind at the moment they’re making decisions.


The food and fitness tracking app MyFitnessPal makes strides in this direction by giving users a weight projection at the end of each day, based on that day’s caloric intake. ("If every day were like today, you’d weigh XYZ in 5 weeks.") From a purely behavioral perspective, showing the weight projection before users make food choices might be more effective—but it’s important to strike a balance between calling attention to the future and disrupting the user experience (particularly when you’re dealing with daily experiences). Testing with real people can help you determine the sweet spot.

2. Define future impacts in terms of personally resonant metrics.

Put future outcomes into clear terms that will resonate with users—like dollars saved, pounds of carbon dioxide reduced. We took the dollars-and-cents approach with Artefact’s SWYP printer concept; the interface makes clear how much each printed page will cost as users are deciding how many pages, and with what quality, to print.




4. Make abstract future outcomes tangible in the present.


5. Pair each future preview with a call to action.

Once the impact of the potential future sinks in, people need to know what to do next to achieve (or avoid) that outcome. There’s a fine line between showing people a realistic view of a possible negative future and freaking them out. While graphic warnings on cigarette packages give smokers an idea of what’s in store—cancerous lungs and rotting teeth—they can be so upsetting that they lead people to revert to unhealthy coping behaviors. Like smoking. Which sort of defeats the purpose.


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  • Awesome post, Nikki. Thanks for researching it so well. My take is that you are not you in your future -- you're someone else!

  • OrionAdvertising

    This is brilliant, pictures worth a 1000 words in languages we can't even imagine.