About

Hal Hershfield is a Professor of Marketing, Behavioral Decision Making, and Psychology at UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he also holds the UCLA Anderson Board of Advisors Term Chair in Management. His research focuses on how thinking about time transforms emotions and influences judgments and decisions, particularly in the context of long-term decision making and aging. Hershfield investigates how time affects people's lives, especially at a moment when Americans are living longer and saving less, aiming to understand and improve financial and ethical decision making related to the future. His work explores the psychological components of saving and retirement, utilizing diverse methods such as neuroimaging, eye tracking, big data analyses, and virtual reality. One of his notable discoveries is that confronting individuals with their 'future selves' can foster an emotional connection that influences their long-term financial behaviors. For example, experiments showing digitally aged images of oneself have demonstrated increased willingness to save. Hershfield emphasizes that increasing the salience of the future self can help people make better decisions, but also cautions against sacrificing present happiness. He completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University and a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, teaching at NYU Stern before joining UCLA Anderson. Hershfield is actively involved in industry consulting, working with organizations such as Prudential, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Merrill Lynch, and the Principal Financial Group. His teaching aims to create an inclusive, engaging environment that resonates with students through pop culture and real-world examples.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Business
• Economics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Marketing
• Family medicine
• Nursing
• Medicine
• Statistics
• Mathematics
• Geography
• Ecology
• Communication
• Environmental science
• Developmental psychology
• Environmental resource management
• Virology
• Advertising
• Applied psychology

Selected publications

• Inflow neglect: Forecasting failures after stocks run out.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2026-03-19

  article

  People frequently encounter dynamic systems that involve inflows, outflows, and accumulated stocks-whether within their own households (e.g., financial accounts, stocks of food or supplies) or in larger institutional settings (e.g., manufacturing inventory, government benefit accounts). In this research, we introduce a novel stock-flow reasoning error, inflow neglect, and argue that this error can lead to important misperceptions regarding future outflows. To study this reasoning, we first focus on the United States' Social Security trust funds, whose impending depletion generates significant attention due to implications for American retirees. In Experiments 1-3, we show participants information about the trust funds over time that focus on the stock (i.e., balance) or flows (i.e., tax revenue and benefits payments), finding that those who see flows presentations are significantly less likely to expect benefits to cease completely after depletion (i.e., hold zero-outflow beliefs). In Experiments 4a and 4b, we show that prompting participants to reflect on the continuity of inflows (i.e., by reminding them that they expect payroll taxes to continue) significantly reduces inflow neglect and zero-outflow beliefs. Experiment 5 replicates these results in a separate domain, illustrating the generalizability of inflow neglect and underscoring the efficacy of presentations and targeted questions that emphasize the flows. This research contributes both theoretically and practically, advancing the literature on stock-flow reasoning and highlighting how communications about particular components of dynamic systems may contribute to-or be used to remedy-misconceptions that outflows will cease after depletion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Simulating Life Paths with Digital Twins: AI-Generated Future Selves Influence Decision-Making and Expand Human Choice

  2026-03-16

  articleOpen access

  Major life transitions require high-stakes decisions, yet humans struggle to forecast how their future selves will live with the consequences. To augment this limited capacity for mental time travel, we introduce AI-generated digital twins that have “lived through” simulated life scenarios—not predictive systems claiming to forecast optimal outcomes, but tools that deepen deliberation by making alternative futures vivid and concrete. In a randomized controlled study (N=192), we used multimodal synthesis (facial age progression, voice cloning, and conversational AI dialogue) to create personalized avatars representing participants 30 years forward. Participants aged 18–28 articulated pending binary decisions (e.g., whether to pursue graduate school or enter the workforce), and were randomly assigned to a control condition or one of four avatar conditions: Option A only, Option B only, both Options A and B, or Options A, B and a novel system-generated alternative C. Single-sided avatar conditions, where either Option A or B were presented, produced marginally significant increases in decision inclination shifts toward the presented option. Balanced presentation with both Options A and B significantly increased overall decision inclination shift, producing movement toward both alternatives. Most strikingly, in the three-avatar condition, participants selected the system-generated novel alternative C at significantly higher rates compared to control, demonstrating that AI-generated future selves can expand human choice by surfacing previously unconsidered life paths. Analysis of vividness dimensions revealed that participants valued evaluative reasoning and eudaimonic meaning-making significantly more than affective resonance or visual realism. Perceived persuasiveness, perceived usefulness of the system, and baseline agency predicted a change in decision inclination. These findings advance understanding of how AI-generated future selves influence decision-making, while raising critical questions about autonomy and persuasion in AI-augmented decision contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Future You: Designing and Evaluating Multimodal AI-generated Digital Twins for Strengthening Future Self-Continuity

  2026-03-03 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Connecting with one’s future self has been shown to enhance decision-making, improve academic performance, promote positive health outcomes, and elevate subjective quality of life. Yet traditional interventions rely on imagination or static visualizations that may not be the most effective. AI-generated digital twins offer a new approach, enabling people to engage in dialogue with a personalized representation of themselves decades ahead. However, it remains unclear how presentation modality shapes their psychological impact. We report a randomized between-subjects study (n = 92) comparing three modalities of an AI-generated future self (text, voice, and a photorealistic talking avatar) against a generic AI control. Our system integrated age progression, voice cloning, and facial animation to create personalized digital twins. All personalized modalities significantly strengthened participants’ connection to their future selves, particularly in how vividly and positively they could imagine who they will become. Although the avatar produced the largest gain in vividness, effects were comparable across modalities. Instead, subjective interaction quality, especially perceived persuasiveness, realism, and engagement, strongly predicted gains in future self-continuity and affect, indicating that experiential quality matters more than interface form. Conversation analysis revealed modality-specific patterns, with text emphasizing instrumental career planning and voice-based interactions eliciting more existential reflection. These findings indicate that effective future-self interventions do not necessarily rely on resource-intensive architecture and can scale through less demanding formats. At the same time, they raise ethical considerations about the implications of persuasive AI that engages users’ own identities.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the distribution and correlates of future self-continuity in a large, nationally representative sample

  Judgment and Decision Making · 2025-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Many people struggle to make tradeoffs between present wants and future wishes, resulting in the tendency to overly discount the value of future rewards. To explain such behavior, past work has pointed to future self-continuity or the perceived connection between a person’s current and future selves. Yet, most of this past work has been conducted on small-to-medium size convenience samples, and as such, little is known regarding the population-level statistics of future self-continuity or how its link to important financial health variables like saving behavior and financial well-being play out in a nationally representative sample. Here, we use a nationally representative sample of over 6,000 Americans to investigate the generalizability of future self-continuity and its connection to financial outcomes such as savings behavior and global financial well-being. We also examine the strength of these associations in the face of a host of other relevant constructs. Overall, this research replicates and extends existing work on the relationship between future self-continuity and financial decision-making among a representative population, and sheds further insight on its potential implications for interventions aimed at enhancing long-term financial well-being.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perspective-taking in capital punishment decisions

  Behavioural Public Policy · 2025-09-18

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Perspective-taking has been theorized to be a central psychological process in how people make punishment decisions. However, previous research has only tested theory in low-stakes or hypothetical contexts. The current research describes how jurors perspective-take in real capital punishment trials ( N = 1,198) and tests a series of hypotheses from previous research in a high-stakes, naturalistic context. In examining the predictors of perspective-taking, we found that jurors are more likely to perspective-take for white victims than black victims, but not more likely to perspective-take if the trial participant is demographically similar to themselves. We further uncovered new findings that older jurors perspective-take less (regardless of whether it is for perpetrators or victims), and women perspective-take for victims more than men do. In examining how perspective-taking relates to capital punishment decisions, we found that jurors who take victims’ perspectives are more likely to vote for the death penalty. We found mixed support for the theory that jurors who take defendants’ perspectives are more lenient. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for legal arguments on the arbitrary and biased nature of capital punishment decisions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A national megastudy shows that email nudges to elementary school teachers boost student math achievement, particularly when personalized

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-03-24 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  In response to the alarming recent decline in US math achievement, we conducted a national megastudy in which 140,461 elementary school teachers who collectively taught 2,992,027 students were randomly assigned to receive a variety of behaviorally informed email nudges aimed at improving students' progress in math. Specifically, we partnered with the nonprofit educational platform Zearn Math to compare the impact of 15 different interventions with a reminder-only megastudy control condition. All 16 conditions entailed weekly emails delivered to teachers over 4-wk in the fall of 2021. The best-performing intervention, which encouraged teachers to log into Zearn Math for an updated report on how their students were doing that week, produced a 5.06% increase in students' math progress (3.30% after accounting for the winner's curse). In exploratory analyses, teachers who received any behaviorally informed email nudge (vs. a reminder-only megastudy control) saw their students' math progress boosted by an average of 1.89% during the 4-wk intervention period; emails referencing personalized data (i.e., classroom-specific statistics) outperformed emails that did not by 2.26%. While small in size, these intervention effects were consistent across school socioeconomic status and school type (public, private, etc.) and, further, persisted in the 8-wk post-intervention period. Collectively, these findings underscore both how difficult it is to change behavior and the need for large-scale, rigorous, empirical research of the sort undertaken in this megastudy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Future You: A Conversation with an AI-Generated Future Self Reduces Anxiety, Negative Emotions, and Increases Future Self-Continuity

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-05-21 · 8 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We introduce "Future You," an interactive, brief, single-session, digital chat intervention designed to improve future self-continuity--the degree of connection an individual feels with a temporally distant future self--a characteristic that is positively related to mental health and wellbeing. Our system allows users to chat with a relatable yet AI-powered virtual version of their future selves that is tuned to their future goals and personal qualities. To make the conversation realistic, the system generates a "synthetic memory"--a unique backstory for each user--that creates a throughline between the user's present age (between 18-30) and their life at age 60. The "Future You" character also adopts the persona of an age-progressed image of the user's present self. After a brief interaction with the "Future You" character, users reported decreased anxiety, and increased future self-continuity. This is the first study successfully demonstrating the use of personalized AI-generated characters to improve users' future self-continuity and wellbeing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Back to the Present: How Direction of Mental Time Travel Affects Similarity and Saving

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2024-04-29 · 8 citations

  article

  Abstract Many consumers say they want to save for the future yet struggle to do so. This research examines this saving behavior problem from a persuasive messaging standpoint. With the goal of helping people take better care of their future selves, we build on a stream of research that has found that the way people view their identities over time affects the saving decisions they make. Although past research on similarity judgments across time almost exclusively starts with the present self and moves forward to the future self, such judgments could theoretically start at any point in time. Here, we explore the possibility of backward mental time travel, by asking people to start in the future and return to the present. A series of studies shows that mentally traveling from the future to the present—rather than the present to the future—increases perceived similarity between selves across time by reducing the uncertainty of the destination self. Lab studies and two large-scale experiments indicate that, as an important outcome of this novel intervention, mentally traveling from the future to the present has a small but positive impact, systematically increasing savings intentions and savings behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• The Interface between Work and Home: Work Recovery Strategies

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  The papers in this symposium explore the complex interplay between work experiences and employees' post-work recuperation. Together, this set of research illuminates the intricacies of recovery processes pivotal in the wellbeing of employees and examines the practices and strategies people employ to enable smooth work and non-work experiences. The first paper probes the 'recovery paradox,' spotlighting the significance of psychological detachment in high-stress work scenarios. The second paper proposes after-work rituals as a valuable practice, substantiated by field experiments and surveys. The third paper delves into the often-neglected aspect of reattaching to work, tying it to fundamental psychological needs and work-related outcomes. Lastly, the fourth paper scrutinizes proactive pushbacks against the prevailing 'always-on' work culture, evaluating its work and non-work implications for employees. Together, these papers present novel theoretical insights and empirical evidence, shedding light on the dynamics between work, recovery, and employee well-being. The symposium offers new directions on recovery research and the importance of fostering a more robust and healthier relationship with work. When is it Difficult to Detach From Work? An Empirical Test of the Recovery Paradox Author: Sabine Sonnentag; U. of Mannheim Author: Laura Venz; Leuphana U. Lüneburg Author: Alexander Pundt; MSB Medicalschool Berlin After-Work Rituals as a Tool to Overcome the Recovery Paradox Author: Benjamin Alan Rogers; Boston College Author: Ovul Sezer; Cornell U. Author: Trevor Watkins; U. of Oklahoma Author: Katherine Ann DeCelles; U. of Toronto Author: Chen-Bo Zhong; U. of Toronto Author: Michael Norton; Harvard U. Author: Hal Hershfield; UCLA Anderson School of Management The Motivational Benefits of Reattachment at Work: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective Author: Aqsa Dutli; Purdue U., West Lafayette Author: John P. Trougakos; U. of Toronto Author: Allison S. Gabriel; Purdue U., West Lafayette Author: Sabine Sonnentag; U. of Mannheim Author: Jason Dahling; College of New Jersey Proactive Pushbacks: Examining the Social Reactions to Work Culture Rebels Author: Katelyn Zipay; Purdue U. Author: Matthew Shurman; Purdue U., West Lafayette Author: Jingran (Mia) Zhou; Purdue U., West Lafayette

  PublisherDOI

• Social inferences from choice context: Dominated options can engender distrust

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2024-06-24 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  • When dominated options – ones that are objectively inferior to at least one other option – are included in a choice set, people distrust the choice architect who offered the menu of choices. • People spontaneously make these negative trust-based inferences, implicating the choice provider’s competence, integrity, and benevolence. • Negative trust inferences diminish people’s interest in choosing any option from that choice provider, even with real stakes on the line. • This finding represents one instance of a broader tendency to make social inferences about the choice provider from the details of the choice environment. The details of a decision context — including the set of alternatives being offered — can considerably influence the judgments and choices that people make. For instance, people’s decisions are often influenced by the presence of a dominated option (one that is objectively inferior to one of the alternatives) in a choice set. In studying such “context effects,” previous research has focused on how the composition of a choice set affects people’s choices and the way they attend to options and weigh attributes. We take a complementary approach. Here, we propose that the composition of a choice set may be interpreted as signaling information about the choice architect who curated the choice set. Further, we hypothesize that these social inferences can systematically influence decisions. Across seven experiments ( N = 3328) using vignette studies and incentive-compatible economic games, we focus on one example of this more general phenomenon, showing that the inclusion of a dominated option can engender distrust in the choice architect. This distrust in turn leads to greater preference for other choice providers. By investigating the social implications of dominated options, we uncover novel psychological and behavioral consequences of choice set composition. We close by considering broader theoretical and practical implications regarding social inferences from choice context.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Cassie Mogilner

  17 shared

• Shlomo Benartzi

  13 shared

• Alissa Fishbane

  Ideas42

  13 shared

• Hugo Mercier

  11 shared

• Adam Eric Greenberg

  10 shared

• Joe J. Gladstone

  University of Colorado Boulder

  10 shared

• Heather Barry Kappes

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  10 shared

• Daniel G. Goldstein

  Microsoft (United States)

  10 shared

Awards & honors

• Behavioral Science and Policy Association’s 2024 Publication…