Instead, while acknowledging that their tastes,
values and even personality have varied over the past decade, people tend to
insist the person they are today is the person they will be in 10 years — a
belief belied by the evidence, said study researcher Daniel Gilbert, a
psychologist at Harvard University.
"It's not that we don't realize change
happens, because we all admit at every age that a lot of change has happened to
us in the last 10 years," "All of us seem to have this sense that
development is a process that has delivered us to this point and now we're
done."
Permanent personality
In a new study published this week (Jan. 4) in the
journal Science, Gilbert and his colleagues dub this mistaken belief the
"end of history" illusion. No matter what age, Gilbert said, people
act as if history shaped them and ended, leaving them in their final form.
The illusion emerged when the researchers recruited
participants online to fill out various personality, preference and value
surveys as themselves 10 years prior and as themselves 10 years in the future.
Over the series of studies, more than 19,000 people participated.
In each case, the researchers compared the
look-ahead answers of 18-year-olds with the look-back answers of 28-year-olds,
and so forth (comparing 19-year-olds with 29-year-olds, and 20-year-olds with
30-year-olds) all the way up to age 68. The older ages always reported changing
in the past decade, but the younger ages did not expect to change nearly as
much in the future as their elders' experiences suggested they would.
"When a 40-year-old looks backward, they say,
'I've changed a lot in terms of my personality, in terms of my values, in terms
of my preferences,'" Gilbert said. "But when 30-year-olds look
forward, they say, 'I don't expect to change a lot on any of those
dimensions.'"
To make sure the results weren't a consequence of
people overestimating their past change rather than underestimating their
future change, the researchers analyzed the actual of
3,808 people who filled out personality questionnaires in 1995-96 and then
again in 2004-05. Sure enough, the measures of actual change in this group were
nearly identical to the reports of change among the current study participants.
In other words, people are good at gauging how much they've changed in the
past. It's the future that gives them trouble.
The "end of history" illusion may be
driven by two factors, Gilbert said. One is that people find it comforting to
believe that they know themselves and that the future is predictable. Thus,
people are motivated to see the present as permanent.
The other is that it's simply harder to imagine the
future than to remember the past may struggle to imagine how they might change
and mistakenly conclude that since they can't figure it out, they won't change
at all, Gilbert said.
Consequences of changing
This misjudgment can have real-world consequences,
Gilbert said. For one thing, people make a number of life choices, from marriage
to careers, assuming that decades from now they'll like the same people and
activities they do today. The researchers even demonstrated some of these
consequences by asking 170 people, ranging in age from 18 to 64, how much
they'd pay today to see their favorite band perform in 10 years. They also
asked how much the people would be willing to pay to see their favorite band of
10 years ago perform this week]
People were willing to shell out £80 to see their
current favorite band in a decade. But they wanted to part with only £50 to see
their former favorite band play now. The gap suggests people are overestimating
how similar their future preferences will be to their current ones, Gilbert
said.
Psychologists actually know quite a bit about how
personality and values change over a lifetime, Gilbert added. For example,
people tend to become less open to new experience over time but more
conscientious, he said. And the older you are, the less you're likely to change
in the future — though you'll still probably change more than you expect, this
study suggests.
"If we know that our preferences are likely to
be less stable than they feel, we can take great care when we make decisions.
We can build in a margin for escape – so, for example, if I am going to buy a
ticket to see a concert in 10 years, I ought to buy a refundable ticket,"
Gilbert said.
But before you write a 10-year opt-out clause into
your wedding vows, take heed: Gilbert's other research has found that when
people feel they have the ability to change their minds, they're less happy
with the choices they've made. People who make irrevocable choices tend to be
happier with them than those who can flip-flop later, Gilbert said.
"The best of all possible worlds would be a
world in which you're allowed to change your mind but you don't know it,"
he said.
