Richard Shotton
speaker
1,228 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 27 Jun
Richard Shotton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It's absolutely in our long term interest to listen to things that are going to keep us living longer.
But in the immediate moment, it makes us feel unpleasant.
And too often we prioritize our immediate feelings rather than what works for us over the medium or long term.
Yes.
So this was an American scheme.
I think it was Shlomo Benartzi that came up with the idea.
And it was called Give More Tomorrow.
And it's exactly as you say, if you ask someone to put more money into their pension today, what they focus on is the loss of that pension.
And they're remarkably resistant to doing it.
They think, well, I can't afford to go on that extra holiday or buy a car.
So what they started to do instead was say to people, look, don't put any more money into Pensions Day.
But when you get your pay rise in nine months' time...
Are you okay if we automatically set up a system where we'll just take 10% of that, 20% of that and put it into your pension?
And because the conversation was about money being taken away long in the future, it felt attenuated to people.
There's an idea called present bias, which is essentially people give too much weight to what's going to happen now in the near future, and we massively underweight pleasure or pain in the distant future.
So often that's a big problem for pensions or insurance or savings.
But Bonazzi's clever design meant that he used human nature to encourage this very desirable behavior.
It might be one of my favorite experiments ever.
I don't think we've ever chatted about this one.
It's a 1998 study from Daniel Reed, who at the time was at University of Leeds, but I think he's at Warwick now.
Showing 681–700 of 1,228 · page 35 of 62
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