

That state of affairs led a scholar named Hal Hershfield to play around with photographs. Especially in the United States, people egregiously undersave for retirement-even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute. Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Asked whether they would take $150 a year from now or $180 in 13 months, people are overwhelmingly willing to wait an extra month for the extra $30. Giving up a 20 percent return on investment is a bad move-which is easy to recognize when the question is thrust away from the present. When asked whether they would prefer to have, say, $150 today or $180 in one month, people tend to choose the $150.


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