INVESTING, POLITICS, AND TIME: HOW TEMPORAL FRAMING CAN OVERCOME PARTISAN MOTIVATED REASONING TOWARDS RETIREMENT SAVING

Abstract

Americans are not financially prepared for retirement and the World Economic Forum (2019) is forecasting the US retirement savings gap to grow consistently for the next three decades. Addressing this retirement savings gap will almost certainly require individuals to increase their retirement savings rate. Embracing this increased individual accountability for retirement savings is found in this research to lead to a higher retirement savings intention. However, this research also found that perceptions about who is accountable for the retirement savings gap is not uniform, but rather is polarized along political lines. Those who affiliate with the Republican party believe relatively more strongly in individual accountability for retirement saving while those who affiliate with the Democratic party believe more strongly in the accountability of institutions like the government, Wall Street and employers. This research experiments with temporal framing as a novel mechanism for disengaging respondents from these politically affiliated retirement savings accountability beliefs, and by doing so, influencing their retirement saving intentions. Temporal framing was chosen as a mechanism for moderating politically affiliated beliefs about perceived accountability for retirement saving because distal temporal framing has been shown in prior research (Roh, McComas, Rickard & Decker, 2015) to be effective in reducing entrenched resistance. Distal framing in this research was expected to reduce resistance to ‘mismatched’ messages – which are ones that counter existing politically affiliated beliefs ab The results confirm a clear distinction between Republican affiliated respondents, who place high accountability for the retirement saving gap on individuals and low accountability on institutions, and Democrat affiliated respondents, who consider both individuals and institutions as accountable. Furthermore, the research confirms that self-identified political affiliation does not influence the importance that respondents placed on retirement savings. And for both political affiliations, a higher perceived individual accountability for retirement savings is associated with an increased retirement savings priority. However, temporal framing as a mechanism for moderating politically affiliated beliefs about accountability was not effective as applied in this research, possibly because the tested messages were not sufficiently persuasive. The findings from this research can be applied by practitioners to set the tone and content of messages about retirement savings, to target messages to the most receptive audiences, and to advance academic understanding of the influence of proximate and distal message framing. And most importantly, this research makes a small but meaningful contribution towards understanding how to ensure a dignified retirement for all Americans.