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.'"
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