Learnings from the lab: Using time progression, perspective taking, and letter writing to increase savings
- Interventions
- Letter writing, Perspective taking, Time progression
- Experiment Type
- Lab Learning
- Goals
- Save more
- Outcomes
- Increase long-term savings
- Focus Areas
- Marketing & messaging, Lab Research
- Behavioral Concepts
- Present bias Salience
What Happened
It is unclear. While the interventions had very little impact, vividness led partipicpants to allocate significantly more money to college savings in a budgeting task. Overall, these findings call for more studies to investigate how to make the future feel more concrete and immediate.
It did not work. None of the conditions led to a significant increase in the perception of time movement and there were no differences between visualization condtions.
It worked. Adding a video element that displaying a person growing up signifcantly increased the perception of time moving. Although, there were no differences between video conditions, which had varying video speeds.
Lessons Learned
Asking people to think vividly about their child in the future may have an impact on college savings, although this result is still unclear. More testing is needed to investigate ways to impact how concrete and immediate the future feels.
These results suggest that mental visualization may not be an impactful intervention to affect perception of time movement.
Showing a time-lapse video of a person growing up may increase perception of time moving and could lead to a feeling that college is closer to the present.
Background
Partnering with academic collaborators from Harvard and UCLA, we ran a series of lab studies to increase willingness to save. The lessons from these studies have directly impacted the design of the college savings field experiments with both Promise Indiana and St. Louis.
Experiment
Experiment 1
One of the main barriers preventing parents from saving is a sense that college is far away. So we sought to develop mechanisms to encourage people to perceive college as closer in time.
To test this idea, we used a time-lapse video showing a person growing up from early childhood to high school. We compared this video to a condition where people were shown no video, and also to two conditions that either sped up or slowed down the video. You can watch the video here.
Experiment 2
Next, we investigated whether mental visualization would influence people’s perceptions of how quickly time was passing. We tested four visualization conditions and asked people to focus on the past, present, or future.
Experiment 3
We then investigated whether asking people to write a letter to their child in the future would affect their willingness to save. We tested different letter conditions, including giving it to their child in a month or at graduation, and asking people to include vivid descriptions of the future or to set plans for helping their child get to college.
Results
Results 1
All video conditions led to a significant increase in the perception of time moving. Similarly, all conditions led people to report thinking college was closer than the no-video condition. From these results, we can conclude that showing people a time-lapse of a child growing up increased the speed at which people saw time as moving. However, we did not see any significant differences between the video conditions. This suggests that speeding or slowing the video did not affect perceptions of time movement.
Results 2
Relative to the control, none of the visualization conditions led to a significant increase in perception of time movement. Looking toward the past made people think college was further away, relative to the control. There were no differences between the visualization conditions, suggesting that, overall, mental visualization did not work.
Results 3
Overall, these interventions had very little impact. However, we did see that, relative to vividness alone, asking people to think vividly about their child in the future – and then think through ways to help their child – led participants to allocate significantly more money to college savings in a budgeting task. All of this suggests that we still have much to learn about how to make the future feel more concrete and immediate.