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Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be
By
John Tierney
Jan. 3, 2013
When we remember our past
selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and
tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect
ourselves to stay the same, a team of psychologists said Thursday, describing research they
conducted of people’s self-perceptions.
They called this phenomenon
the “end of history illusion,” in which people tend to “underestimate how much
they will change in the future.” According to their research, which involved
more than 19,000 people ages 18 to 68, the illusion persists from teenage years
into retirement.
“Middle-aged people — like me
— often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and
chagrin,” said one of the authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at
Harvard. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look
back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having
the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”
Other psychologists said they
were intrigued by the findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, and were impressed with the amount of supporting
evidence. Participants were asked about their personality traits and
preferences — their favorite foods, vacations, hobbies and bands — in years
past and present, and then asked to make predictions for the future. Not surprisingly,
the younger people in the study reported more change in the previous decade
than did the older respondents.
But when asked to predict
what their personalities and tastes would be like in 10 years, people of all
ages consistently played down the potential changes ahead.
Thus, the typical 20-year-old
woman’s predictions for her next decade were not nearly as radical as the
typical 30-year-old woman’s recollection of how much she had changed in her
20s. This sort of discrepancy persisted among respondents all the way into
their 60s.
And the discrepancy did not
seem to be because of faulty memories, because the personality changes recalled
by people jibed quite well with independent research charting how personality
traits shift with age. People seemed to be much better at recalling their
former selves than at imagining how much they would change in the future.
Why? Dr. Gilbert and his
collaborators, Jordi Quoidbach of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia, had a few theories, starting
with the well-documented tendency of people to overestimate their own
wonderfulness.
“Believing that we just
reached the peak of our personal evolution makes us feel good,” Dr. Quoidbach
said. “The ‘I wish that I knew then what I know now’ experience might give us a
sense of satisfaction and meaning, whereas realizing how transient our
preferences and values are might lead us to doubt every decision and generate
anxiety.”
Or maybe the explanation has
more to do with mental energy: predicting the future requires more work than
simply recalling the past. “People may confuse the difficulty of imagining
personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself,” the authors wrote in
Science.
The phenomenon does have its
downsides, the authors said. For instance, people make decisions in their youth
— about getting a tattoo, say, or a choice of spouse — that they sometimes come
to regret.
And that illusion of
stability could lead to dubious financial expectations, as the researchers
showed in an experiment asking people how much they would pay to see their
favorite bands.
When asked about their
favorite band from a decade ago, respondents were typically willing to shell
out $80 to attend a concert of the band today. But when they were asked about
their current favorite band and how much they would be willing to spend to see
the band’s concert in 10 years, the price went up to $129. Even though they
realized that favorites from a decade ago like Creed or the Dixie Chicks have
lost some of their luster, they apparently expect Coldplay and Rihanna to blaze
on forever.
“The end-of-history effect
may represent a failure in personal imagination,” said Dan P. McAdams, a
psychologist at Northwestern who has done
separate researchinto the stories people
construct about their past and future lives. He has often heard people tell
complex, dynamic stories about the past but then make vague, prosaic
projections of a future in which things stay pretty much the same.
Dr. McAdams was reminded of a
conversation with his 4-year-old daughter during the craze for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the 1980s. When he told her they might not
be her favorite thing one day, she refused to acknowledge the possibility. But
later, in her 20s, she confessed to him that some part of her 4-year-old mind
had realized he might be right.
“She resisted the idea of
change, as it dawned on her at age 4, because she could not imagine what else
she would ever substitute for the Turtles,” Dr. McAdams said. “She had a
sneaking suspicion that she would change, but she couldn’t quite imagine how,
so she stood with her assertion of continuity. Maybe something like this goes
on with all of us.”
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