Can we help people improve their life expectancy? – Center for retirement research

Getting started

Understanding how long you can live can influence important decisions, such as how much to save or buy an annuity. However, many people underestimate their chances of living to old age, which can lead them to save too little and protect their financial security instead of retirement.

This one – short Deep sweating in prolonged awareness as part of a future study.¹ It examines whether simple and low-cost informational interventions can increase longevity awareness – people’s understanding of how long they are likely to live. So far, the study fields are experimental with a control group and two treatment groups. Treatment groups receive educational materials designed to increase their awareness of how long they can live.

This page – short it is organized as follows. The first section provides background on long-term awareness. The second section describes the survey and evaluation. The third section presents the results and shows that the intervention was indeed effective, but only for a quarter of the participants. The final section concludes that low-cost interventions can work for population selection and that the less detailed information may actually be better. A question for future research is how to reach other insomniacs in these types of interventions.

It’s a layer

Previous research has suggested that older adults aged 55-70 tend to be pessimistic about how long they will live, as their estimates of life expectancy (dashed lines in Injongo (solid lines).² This pessimism can negatively affect decisions about savings and renewal, because some people will have to decide whether to buy money and how to manage their years when they may underestimate their life expectancy.

The question is, can educational interventions help make people face the facts about their life expectancy. Previous research has found that presenting people with life-probability data in very old adults improved their long-term awareness, while presenting data on life expectancy did not.⁺ This finding suggests that people may know – common Life Expectancy But not about their chance of living to old age. In addition, many people base their life expectancy on the time of their death or on media reports, but none of these things have thought about the future development of the living.⁴

A study and a randomized control case

Building on these two empirical facts about the effectiveness of interventions and the traditional sources that people rely on, our experiment tests two different methods of knowledge to address the different relationship that people can have with longevity. The first is “tail risk,” or you don’t know the odds of living to a very old age. Respondents in the first treatment group were given specific information from the social security administration about tail risk. The second bias is not understanding the extent to which longevity is better over time. Respondents assigned to the second intervention were given the same data as those in the first treatment group, with the additional content of how often people lived with their parents. For details about the survey sample, see the box.

Participants were first asked to choose the most important thing they use to measure their life expectancy. As in previous studies, our survey found that the majority of respondents based this assessment on their parents (or other relatives) of their death, while about ten percent based it on media coverage (see Table 1). Interestingly, almost one-quarter of respondents said they relied on health or financial advice.

Next, to find out that a simple informational intervention can help correct the mistakes of the gardens of longevity, we divided the survey participants into three groups: a control group and two intervention groups.

The control group was given something that was not suitable for life expectancy, survival, or mortality improvement over time.^{What is bought on the knee} After the participants in the control group read this content, they were asked to rate how long they thought they would live and their chances of living 75, 80, 85, … and 100 years.

The first treatment group was given information about the probability of living to 90 and 100 years from social security death records. As in the Groupt Group, they were then asked to rate how long they thought they might live and how likely they would be to find people in the middle of a higher age improving long-term health data. Identifying effective ways to improve the understanding of this potential tail is very important in considering whether to buy a life income, because the risk of the tail is what the products have been exposed to.⁶

However, as noted, most people base their life expectancy on the death of their parents. Interventions that tell people how long they can live relative to their parents (or grandparents of other minors) have been previously studied. Therefore, in addition to the data about the probability of living years, the second treatment group was also given information about the long rise across the cohorts and how long you live compared to parents or grandparents. Then, they were asked to estimate their life expectancy at various ages between 75 and 100.

The result

The intervention worked well, but only one group of respondents – those who support their life predictions with advice from medical experts or financial advisors. Respondents who depended on him were more optimistic about life expectancy after the information intervention. This group represents slightly more than a quarter of survey respondents who received treatment. In contrast, the intervention had no effect on those based on their assessment of life at the time of their parents’ death or other factors. Figure 2 summarizes the results of those who base their life predictions on expert advice. For example, among these people, those in the first group of treatment – who received only what lasts for years – 8 percent of the probability that they will live at least 85 chances.^{The purchase was heard +}

How does intervention compare to financial advisors?

An interesting question is how does the effect of the intervention compare to the effect of having a financial advisor (again, for one quarter of respondents who rely on professional advice)? Not surprisingly, people who worked with financial advisors had higher life expectancy than those who did not (see figure 3).⁸

What is more interesting, however, is that when we compare the effect of the intervention and the effect of the counselors, we see that the intervention had the same effect on people’s predictions of living to old age. Although the intervention only works for a quarter of people – those who trust the experts – the results are still encouraging because not everyone gets a financial advisor. In short, this information intervention can be an effective way to improve long-term awareness.⁹

Can an intervention help in learning financial literacy?

Next, we examine how the intervention compares to those with higher financial or financial literacy. Obviously, people with high financial or financial literacy have higher life expectancy than those with low children (see figure 4).

It is interesting that Figure 4 shows that the intervention was more consistent in improving the long-term development associated with high financial writing, although the effect is smaller than those with high annuity learning.^{What is trusted} Since financial literacy and capital formation can take years to build, it is encouraging that informational interventions can influence.

Lasting

Understanding how much time can affect us can influence important decisions, such as how much to save or buy an annuity. However, many people underestimate their chances of living to old age. We tested whether a brief informational intervention could help correct human errors. The results from this study provide two important lessons. The first is that only a set of people accept the intervention – in fact, they are those who trust the experts with their knowledge. For this group, the intervention worked. In other groups, more research is needed to find out how to improve long-term awareness, because such people tend not to support their evaluation with a professional opinion, which makes the intervention from the testers more effective.

The second lesson is to provide simple and, if not better, as detailed interventions. While the intervention may not be long-term, our results revealed that providing some information – about the life expectancy of many years – and it is enough to raise more money with a reduction in mortality did not improve the results.

Progress

Arapakis, Karolos, ANQI Chen, Qi Sun, and Gal Wettein. (forthcoming). Retirement Security Course. Newport Beach, CA: Pacific Life.

Arapakis, Karolos, and Gal Wettein. 2023. “The Long Peril: An Essay.” Special report. Chestnut Hill, MA: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Rupwitz, Abigail, Olivia S. Mitchell, and Sade Orly. 2022. “Experimental Methods for Long-Term Awareness Improvement.” Journal of Economic Situation & Organization 204: 466-475.

Rupwitz, Abigail and Olivia S. Mitchell. 2022. “Financial Regret in Old Age and Longitudinal Awareness.” Working Paper No. 2022-25. Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania, Council on Pension Research.

Endnotes