Hal Hershfield

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…

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Business
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics
• Marketing
• Advertising
• Medicine
• Family medicine

Selected publications

• Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

  Science Advances · 2024 · 248 citations

  Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond Stereotypes: Using Socioemotional Selectivity Theory to Improve Messaging to Older Adults

  Current Directions in Psychological Science · 2021 · 232 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The tremendous heterogeneity in functional and demographic characteristics of the over-65 age group presents challenges to effective marketing and public health communications. Messages grounded on tacit assumptions that older people are frail, incompetent, and needy risk being overlooked by most of the older population; on the other hand, ignoring age-associated vulnerabilities is problematic. We argue that while traditional approaches to market segmentation based on chronological age often fai…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 191 citations

  Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages. We found that the reminder texts that we tested incr…

  PublisherDOI

• Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2021-09-09 · 64 citations

  articleSenior author

  Many people living in modern society feel like they do not have enough time and are constantly searching for more. But is having limited discretionary time actually detrimental? And can there be downsides of having too much discretionary time? In two large-scale data sets spanning 35,375 Americans and two experiments, we explore the relationship between the amount of discretionary time individuals have and their subjective well-being. We find and internally replicate a negative quadratic relatio…

  PublisherDOI

• Temporal Reframing and Participation in a Savings Program: A Field Experiment

  Marketing Science · 2020 · 48 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This study explores whether framing savings in more or less granular formats can increase sign-ups for a recurring deposit program in a FinTech environment.

  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…

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Peter Rossih-63
• Cassie Mogilner Holmesh-27
• Anand V. Bodapatih-20