The decision of when to claim Social Security benefits is among the most consequential and irreversible financial choices older Americans face, yet interventions to help guide it have had limited effectiveness. Building upon past research demonstrating that people choose differently and make different predictions for others than they do for themselves, we ask whether making recommendations for another can shift one’s own claiming decision. In two high-powered experiments using national survey panels, we show that older American adults intend to claim retirement income benefits earlier (vs. later) after making guided recommendations for a person who died relatively young (vs. lived to an old age) after retiring. This effect persists when the effect of recalling such a person is disentangled from that of recommending. This research suggests that making guided recommendations for others can be a powerful intervention for one’s own choices in highly consequential domains where trade-offs are difficult to make.
