Conversation with a future self: A letter-exchange exercise enhances student self-continuity, career planning, and academic thinking

ABSTRACT

We expected that enhanced future self-continuity could benefit students planning future academic and career pursuits, and tested a new method to foster self-continuity. A pilot study demonstrated that future self-continuity predicted academic and career planning and was lower in vocational-oriented than academic-oriented high school students. In Study 1, vocational-track students’ future self-continuity was higher after a letter exchange exercise with their future self (send and reply). In Study 2, students randomly assigned to a letter exchange (send to and reply from future self) condition showed increases in future self-continuity, career planning, and academic delay of gratification relative to students assigned to a send-only condition. Perspective taking with a future self can close the gap between present and future selves.

KEYWORDS:

• Future self-continuity
• career planning
• academic-related behavior
• school activity
• high school students

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

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Notes

1. Past research on self-continuity has varied in terms of how “future self” is defined. Many studies have adopted a 10-year future self as the comparison other (e.g., Ersner-Hershfield, Garton et al., 2009). Across the three studies in the current paper, we instead used the period of three years later to refer to the “future” for two reasons. First, imagining a 10-year future self may be too distant to form a vivid, concrete image (Trope & Liberman, 2003), perhaps especially for adolescents who will be encountering a period of marked transition. Indeed, Kivetz and Tyler (2007) found that a distal perspective on the self is increasingly idealistic, versus pragmatic, in nature. Second, the meaningful time-span for adolescents’ formative academic and career decisions may be shorter than 10 years. Although the benefits of health-related or saving behaviors may not be enjoyed until many years into the future (Hershfield, 2011; Rutchick et al., 2018), current academic behaviors can have a measurable effect on scholarly and career outcomes over the nearer term.

2. We conducted an analysis to explore the mediation effects of the increased future self-continuity. We added the IV of condition (send and reply condition = 1, send only condition = 0), the DVs of different scores of career planning/academic delay of gratification, and the change (difference score) in future self-continuity as a mediator, showing a good model fit (CFI = 1.00; RMSEA = 0.00). Results of mediation analyses with bootstrapping method (n = 5,000) showed that the association between condition and Δcareer planning was not significantly mediated by Δfuture self-continuity (estimate =.006; p = n.s.; 95%CI = −.019 to.040). On the other hand, Δfuture self-continuity significantly mediated the relationship between condition and Δacademic delay of gratification (estimate =.038; p <.05; 95%CI =.001 to.109). These results indicated that the effect of the letter-exchanging exercise on increased academic behavior was significantly explained by increased future self-continuity. However, career planning was not explained by the increased future self-continuity, but enhanced by the letter-exchanging exercise directly.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [16H06656].