The End of History Illusion

Older and Wiser Do we ever stop growing up? Quoidbach et al. (p. 96) elicited estimates of people's personality, values, and choices and compared how much, for instance, 33-year-olds believed that they would change in the next 10 years with how much 43-year-olds reported that they had changed in the past 10 years. For groups spanning 18 to 68 years of age, people of all ages described more change in the past 10 years than they would have predicted 10 years ago. Even though we know that we've changed over the years, we believe, mistakenly, that we won't change much in the future. We measured the personalities, values, and preferences of more than 19,000 people who ranged in age from 18 to 68 and asked them to report how much they had changed in the past decade and/or to predict how much they would change in the next decade. Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This “end of history illusion” had practical consequences, leading people to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences.

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