Known horizons, as future-oriented cues, help individuals to manage vulnerable resources

Research into improving poor resource management has tended to focus on social interventions that mitigate so-called 'Tragedy of the Commons' outcomes. Less work has investigated interventions to help individuals better manage their personal resources. Over three studies (N=1,597), we test whether informational cues can improve resource management strategies while individuals harvest from a replenishing but depletable resource, returning monetary rewards. To succeed, individuals need to learn about the dynamics (and vulnerability) of the resource while avoiding the long-term costs of early bad decisions. We find little evidence that outcomes are improved by knowledge of the potential monetary returns of the resource or by prior encounters with its dynamics. By contrast, future-orienting information about the potential availability of a resource; its horizon – operationalized as the maximum number of remaining harvesting opportunities – dramatically improves individual resource outcomes (in Experiments 1 and 2). This future-oriented cue did not provide information about the dynamics of the resource that could be used to infer an improved resource management strategy and its benefits are not transitory: informational 'nudges' about the resource horizon continue to improve outcomes over multiple encounters (Experiment 3). These findings indicate that when individuals try to explore and manage a personal resource in uncertain environments where early missteps have long-term adverse consequences, simple future-orienting cues about potential resource longevity improve harvesting decisions. Our findings also highlight how variability in how individuals approach resource management problems per se might contribute to resource difficulties at the group-level.