You May Not Recognize Yourself in 10 Year

Think you'll be the same person in 10 years that you are today? Think again. Most people realize they've changed in the past, but few expect to change in the future, a new study finds.

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," Gilbert told LiveScience. "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.'"