Tomorrow always feels costlier

Behavioral scientists Todd Rogers and Max Bazerman call this commitment strategy “future lock-in,” and deploying it requires making a small but important change in your approach. Rather than asking people to agree to a change right away, you should ask them to agree to a change that will be implemented at some point in the future, assuming of course that it is a change that benefits them and ideally aligns with their personal values. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this small modification, researchers told study participants about a proposal to increase the price of gas by 20 cents a gallon as a way of helping to reduce overall gas consumption. However, half the participants were told the policy was going to be implemented as soon as possible, and the other half were told that it would be implemented in four years. When the policy was expected to be put in place immediately, only 26 percent supported it, but when it was expected to lie dormant for four years before being implemented, 41 percent supported the gas price rise policy.