I just read a wonderful little article about how we think about ourselves. The paper, which came out in January, opens with a tantalizing paragraph that I simply have to share:

“At every stage of life, people make decisions that profoundly influence the lives of the people they will become—and when they finally become those people, they aren’t always thrilled about it. Young adults pay to remove the tattoos that teenagers paid to get, middle-aged adults rush to divorce the people whom young adults rushed to marry, and older adults visit health spas to lose what middle-aged adults visited restaurants to gain. Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret?”

To answer this question, the study’s authors recruited nearly 20,000 participants from the website of “a popular television show.” (I personally think they should have told us which one. I’d imagine there are differences between the people who flock to the websites for Oprah, The Nightly News, or, say, Jersey Shore.)

The study subjects ranged in age from 18 to 68 years of age. For the experiment, they had to fill out an online questionnaire about their current personality, core values, or personal preferences (such as favorite food). Half of the subjects—those in the reporter group—were then asked to report how they would have filled out the questionnaire ten years prior, while the other half—those in the predictor group—were asked to predict how they will fill it out ten years hence. For each subject, the authors computed the difference between the subject’s responses for his current self and those for his reported past self or predicted future self. And here’s the clever part: they could compare participants across ages. For example, they could compare how an 18-year-old’s prediction of his 28-year-old future self differed from a 28-year-old’s report of his 18-year-old self. It sounds crazy, but they did some great follow up studies to make sure the comparison was valid.

The results show a remarkable pattern. People believe that they have changed considerably in the past, even while they expect to change little in the future. And while they tend to be pretty accurate in their assessment of how much they’ve changed in years passed, they are grossly underestimating how much they will change in the coming years. The authors call this effect The End of History Illusion. And it’s not just found in shortsighted teenagers or twenty-somethings. While the study showed that older people do change less than younger people, they still underestimate how much they will continue to change in the decade to come.

The End of History Illusion is interesting in its own right. Why are we so illogical when reasoning about ourselves – and particularly, our own minds? We all understand that we will change physically as we age, both in how well our bodies function and how they look to others. Yet we deny the continued evolution (or devolution) of our traits, values, and preferences. We live each day as though we have finally achieved our ultimate selves. It is, in some ways, a depressing outlook. As much as we may like ourselves now, wouldn’t it be more heartening to believe that we will keep growing and improving as human beings?

The End of History Illusion also comes with a cost. We are constantly making flawed decisions for our future selves. As the paper’s opening paragraph illustrated, we take actions today under the assumption that our future desires and needs won’t change. In a follow up study, the authors even demonstrate this effect by showing that people would be willing to pay an average of $129 now to see a concert by their favorite band in ten years, while they would only be willing to pay an average of $80 now to see a concert by their favorite band from ten years back. Here, the illusion will only cost us money. In real life, it could cost us our health, our families, our future well-being.

This study reminded me of a book I read a while back called Stumbling on Happiness (written, it turns out, by the second author on this paper). The book’s central thesis is that we are bad at predicting what will make us happy and the whole thing is written in the delightful style of this paper’s opening paragraph. For those of you with the time, it’s worth a read. For those of you without time, I can only hope you’ll have more time in the future. With any luck we’ll all have more – more insight, more compassion, more happiness—in the decade to come.

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Photo credit: Darla Hueske

Quoidbach J, Gilbert DT, & Wilson TD (2013). TheEnd of History Illusion Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1229294