Designing for Behavior Change, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Defining the Problem

If you currently save for the future, what’s your goal? I know it sounds strange, but if I were to ask you in a few hours, the answer might be different. That’s because we tend to respond to questions like this with what comes easily to mind, either because it’s something we think about frequently or we were recently exposed to.

If I asked you right after you’d gone through an expensive neighborhood, you might answer that you wanted to save up to afford a nice house and lifestyle. If you’d just spoken to your father who was recovering from an illness in the hospital, you might answer that you wanted to have what you needed to pay for medical expenses in the future. But in reality, both are true, and it would be hard to tell which was more important.

At Morningstar, my team thought this might be a problem among everyday Americans—we’d found research documenting it in particular circumstances, such as MBA students not providing stable answers about their goals for a summer internship and major executives not giving stable answers on the goals of their company.¹ If so, it would represent a real challenge to how we encourage people to save and invest, since knowing why people save is key to helping them commit to, and follow through on, their savings goals over time.

We decided to assess the problem among two populations: a nationally representative ...