https://phys.org/news/2018-07-slacking-cognitive-bias-blame.html

"Fundamentally it comes down to this: saving is less valuable to our brains, which devote less attentional resources to it," said study co-author Adam Anderson, associate professor of human development. "It's more than a financial problem of making ends meet. Our brains find saving more difficult to attend to."

The paper, "Differential temporal salience of earning and saving," was published July 20 in Nature Communications. Co-author Eve De Rosa is an associate professor of human development and Kesong Hu, a postdoctoral fellow in Anderson and De Rosa's Affect and Cognition Lab, is lead author.