IT WAS with blended emotions that Hal Hershfield sat down for a video chat with a serial killer. However Hershfield, a behavioural economist on the College of California, Los Angeles, believed Pedro Rodrigues Filho may educate him one thing about how we will all make higher choices.
Rodrigues spent a complete of 41 years in jail for murdering 71 folks, and different crimes. Of their dialog, he described to Hershfield how, sooner or later, he dramatically modified his mindset. Whereas in solitary confinement after killing a fellow prisoner who attacked him, he mentioned, he spoke to God and vowed to vary.
Following his second launch from jail, in 2018, Rodrigues claimed to have stopped killing, began exercising and commenced educating others in regards to the risks of crime on YouTube. “I take into account myself to be a brand new particular person now,” he advised Hershfield.
This dramatic change was “a strolling instance of how we may be completely different folks over time”, says Hershfield. In his ebook, Your Future Self, Hershfield reveals that individuals who really feel near their future selves – and realise they might be completely different to their current selves – make higher choices, reminiscent of exercising and staying on the precise facet of the legislation. They have a tendency to have higher college grades, superior funds and larger well-being.
Not like Rodrigues, you don’t want a non secular epiphany to make such a change. Hershfield is testing numerous strategies to permit us to have interaction with our future selves – together with writing them letters and even speaking to them in digital actuality – that might rework not solely the way you relate to your self, but additionally the way you behave within the …