No matter who you are today, you’ll likely be a pretty different person in ten years.
Don’t agree? According to a recent study conducted by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, you’d be in the majority. Most people generally fail to appreciate how much their personality and values will change in the upcoming years, even if they recognize how much they’ve changed in the past.
“I have this deep sense that although I will physically age—I’ll have even less hair than I do and probably a few more pounds—that by and large the core of me, my identity, my values, my personality, my deepest preferences, are not going to change from here on out,” says Gilbert, who is 55.
As NPR reported, Gilbert wanted to see if others felt the same. So, he and his colleagues Jordi Quoidbach and Timothy Wilson analyzed data from over 19,000 surveys and found that people, whether they are teenagers or middle-aged, underestimate how much they will change in the future. Life is a process of growing and changing that never really stops, but people of a variety of ages seem to think it does.
Personality changes do take place faster when people are younger, says Gilbert, so “a person who says I’ve changed more in the past decade than I expect to change in the future is not wrong.” But that doesn’t mean they fully understand what’s still to come. “Their estimates of how much they’ll change in the future are underestimates,” says Gilbert. “They are going to change more than they realize. Change does slow; it just doesn’t slow as much as we think it will.”
Gilbert and his colleagues don’t yet know why many of us seem to have an “end of history illusion.” It might be really difficult to imagine a different future, or it might be difficult to think of unknown change.