IT WAS with combined 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 train him one thing about how we will all make higher choices.
Rodrigues spent a complete of 41 years in jail for murdering 71 individuals, and different crimes. Of their dialog, he described to Hershfield how, someday, he dramatically modified his mindset. Whereas in solitary confinement after killing a fellow prisoner who attacked him, he stated, 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 started educating others concerning the risks of crime on YouTube. “I think about 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 individuals over time”, says Hershfield. In his guide, Your Future Self, Hershfield reveals that individuals who really feel near their future selves – and realise they could be completely different to their current selves – make higher choices, similar to exercising and staying on the right side of the law. They have an inclination to have better university grades, superior finances and greater well-being.
In contrast to Rodrigues, you don’t want a non secular epiphany to make such a change. Hershfield is testing numerous methods to permit us to interact with our future selves – together with writing them letters and even speaking to them in virtual reality – that might rework not solely the way you relate to your self, but in addition the way you behave within the …
Source link
