How to Get Yourself to Skip That Latte, and Save Money

Bartels and Urminsky draw their conclusions from a series of experiments. In one, the researchers had participants decide whether to buy a more expensive iPad or a less expensive model. People who’d first read that people’s identities change little over time were more financially patient in general, requiring less compensation to wait for delayed rewards. These people were more likely to choose the cheaper version of the iPad, but only when reminded to consider other uses for their money. For others, who’d first read that the self does change over time, the reminder about saving money didn’t have any effect on their buying decisions. Bartels and Urminsky hypothesize that those participants didn’t value future outcomes as much because they didn’t identify as much with their future selves.

And caring about that future self may be what makes a person rethink present values and spending habits. In another experiment, participants were asked to rank how important different categories of products were to them. When also asked to think about the stability of the self over time, they were more likely to say they’d spend less on the categories that they ranked as less important. “Making people think about and value the future didn’t simply make them stingy, it caused them to spend more wisely—to make better financial decisions by focusing their spending on only what was really important to them,” says Bartels.

To improve savings rates, it’s important to help people see that simple changes to their current spending can affect future finances, according to Bartels and Urminsky. But it’s also critical to remind people that they’ll still be the same individuals in 10 or 20 years, and to get them to care about this continuity. That way we’ll see a daily latte sacrifice as a series of gifts to our future selves, rather than painful self-deprivation in the present.