Who Will You Be in Ten Years TIme? 18 Jan 2013

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert and his team created an online study involving 19 000 people to better understand how well they were able to predict the extent to which they would change in the future. Since many of the major decisions we make will have long lasting consequences, this study seeks to better understand how people make predictions about their future selves.

Although teenagers are notoriously bad at envisioning their future selves ("Of course I'll always want this butterfly tattoo!"), Gilbert says he was surprised that even older people seem to underestimate how much they'll change. For example, 68-year-olds reported modest personality changes in the previous decade, but 58-year-olds predicted very little, if any, change in the coming decade, even though their survey answers indicated that they had changed considerably since they were 48. Several follow-up experiments suggested that these differences reflect errors in predicting the future rather than errors in remembering the past. Gilbert and colleagues call this effect "the end of history illusion," because it suggests that people believe, consciously or not, that the present marks the point at which they've finally stopped changing.

In additional surveys, the researchers found that people similarly underestimate changes in their personal values (things like success and security) and preferences (like their favorite band and best friend). "What these data suggest, and what scads of other data from our lab and others suggest, is that people really aren't very good at knowing who they're going to be and hence what they're going to want a decade from now," Gilbert says.

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