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Intention and action in retirement preparation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2018

JOB M.T. KRIJNEN ,
MARCEL ZEELENBERG ,
SEGER M. BREUGELMANS  and
ANNA VAN DER SCHORS
JOB M.T. KRIJNEN*
Affiliation:
UCLA Anderson School of Management, Los Angeles, CA, USA
MARCEL ZEELENBERG
Affiliation:
Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands and Department of Marketing, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
SEGER M. BREUGELMANS
Affiliation:
Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
ANNA VAN DER SCHORS
Affiliation:
National Institute for Family Finance Information (Nibud), Utrecht, The Netherlands
*
*Correspondence to: UCLA Anderson School of Management, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA90095, USA. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Many people delay their preparation for retirement. Policy-makers often attempt to motivate people to take timely action by increasing the perceived importance of retirement saving, yet the effectiveness of such strategies can be doubted. We examined why a strategy of emphasizing importance may be ineffective by distinguishing between intention to prepare for retirement and action in actually taking steps toward preparation. Two surveys (n1 = 1171; n2 = 832) showed that importance and difficulty were both predictive of people's intentions to prepare for retirement, but that difficulty was a much stronger predictor of people's actual actions. Using data from an additional survey (n3 = 986), a series of follow-up tests provided further evidence that difficulty of retirement preparation is a stronger predictor of inaction than importance of retirement saving. These findings help explain why policies aimed at simplifying retirement preparation (e.g., automatic enrollment) have been more successful than policies aimed at increasing the importance of retirement saving (e.g., tax advantages).

Type
Article
Information
Behavioural Public Policy , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 191 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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