Effects of episodic future thinking on discounting: Personalized age-progressed pictures improve risky long-term health decisions.
A quick look at an age-progressed photo of yourself makes future health feel real and cuts risky discounting.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers added a twist to episodic future thinking. They showed people computer-made photos of themselves at an older age.
Then they asked the people to pick between risky health choices. The team wanted to see if the aged photos would make future health feel real.
What they found
The new picture prompt worked. People took the safer, long-term health option more often.
Standard future-thinking words were not as strong as seeing your own older face.
How this fits with other research
Lahav et al. (2015) saw that teens care less about the future when money is on the line. The photo fix may help those same teens choose safer health bets.
Geurts et al. (2008) found that framing money as "gaining" beats "losing" for quitting smoking. Both studies tweak how choices are shown to boost healthy picks.
Beaulieu et al. (2024) taught adults to set SMART health goals with a short BST package. Pairing their goal lesson with the aged-photo view could lock in the plan.
Goodwin et al. (2012) used four talk-therapy sessions to help heart patients eat better. Adding a quick glance at a future self might stretch their progress even further.
Why it matters
You can cut discounting without long lessons. Just pull up an age-progressed photo app, show the client their future face, then run your regular health-choice program. The image takes seconds and may save you weeks of delay training.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Many everyday choices are associated with both delayed and probabilistic outcomes. The temporal attention hypothesis suggests that individuals' decision making can be improved by focusing attention on temporally distal events and implies that environmental manipulations that bring temporally distal outcomes into focus may alter an individual's degree of discounting. One such manipulation, episodic future thinking, has shown to lower discount rates; however, several questions remain about the applicability of episodic future thinking to domains other than delay discounting. The present experiments examine the effects of a modified episodic-future-thinking procedure in which participants viewed age-progressed computer-generated images of themselves and answered questions related to their future, on probability discounting in the context of both a delayed health gain and loss. Results indicate that modified episodic future thinking effectively altered individuals' degree of discounting in the predicted directions and demonstrate the applicability of episodic future thinking to decision making of socially significant outcomes.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2016 · doi:10.1002/jaba.277