Our Personalities Undergo Constant Transformation, Even When We Believe Otherwise
Rarely do scientific journals delve into philosophical inquiries, but an article in this week’s Science magazine opens with the question: “Why do people often make decisions that their future selves regret?” At 18, getting a skull-and-crossbones tattoo might seem like a brilliantly cool idea; by 28, it becomes embarrassing. You meet the person of your dreams at 25—only to find your dreams have evolved so much by 35 that you end up divorced.
“Even at 68, people think, ‘Ugh, I’m not the person I was at 58, but I’m sure I’ll be like this at 78,’” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the book Stumbling on Happiness, one of the authors of the Science study.
A straightforward answer to the question is that people mature— that “change is inevitable,” as British politician Benjamin Disraeli said, that “change is constant.” However, after examining the responses of over 19,000 individuals gathered over four months in 2011 and 2012, the researchers—Gilbert, Jordi Quoidbach of the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium, and University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson—found that while most people acknowledge that their lives have changed over the past decade, they don’t believe change is ongoing. Against all evidence, most people seem to believe that who they are now is essentially who they will be forever.
For instance, the average 33-year-old surveyed expected less change over the next decade than the average 43-year-old reported had actually occurred over the past decade. As the paper states, “People, it seems, view the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.” Although personality and values do tend to become more stable with age, people generally underestimate the extent of future personality shifts. The researchers term this phenomenon “the end of history illusion.”
Proving an illusion is a significant epistemological challenge, which is why the authors enlisted such a large number of participants for their study—though many of the thousands were recruited from a website sponsored by a French reality show, Leurs Secrets du Bonheur (The Secrets of Happiness). Analyzing the answers that volunteers provided to questions about their favorite music, food, hobbies, as well as choices regarding friends and vacations, Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson compared individuals at different stages of life and reached several conclusions:
- The older you get, the less you believe you have changed or will change. This finding isn’t surprising: for years, researchers have affirmed the common-sense notion that one’s personality and preferences become more stable with age. At 80, your grandfather is more likely to denigrate whichever political party he opposes with more fervor than he did at 65. As the Science research explains, even young people feel their current qualities are good qualities. They find it hard to imagine their beliefs and values could significantly change—although most of us do change our views frequently as time progresses.
- Similarly, people tend to acknowledge that their personalities and preferences have changed in the past but underestimate that personalities and preferences often change in the future. As part of the research, the scientists examined how self-reported personality traits had changed among 3,808 adults recruited not by that French TV show but by the MacArthur Foundation. The participants had completed a personality survey (as part of a larger study called MIDUS, or Midlife Development in the United States) in the mid-1990s and then again in the mid-2000s. Among other things, MIDUS measures what are known as the Big Five personality traits: optimism, agreeableness, emotional stability (sometimes called neuroticism), openness to experience, and extraversion.
The MIDUS surveys are widely accepted for their reliability, so the researchers assumed that any difference between scores in the mid-1990s and those in the mid-2000s accurately captured changes in how people are principled, agreeable, stable, open, and outgoing today versus 10 years ago. The researchers then asked the participants to estimate how much their MIDUS measures would have changed from 10 years ago and how much they will change in 10 years. Most people were quite accurate at estimating the difference in average MIDUS scores over the past decade, but they dramatically underestimated how much MIDUS scores change for most people in the future. In short, people may make errors of prediction more often than they fall prey to errors of memory.
As further evidence that the effect they were tracking was real, the researchers conducted another study with a smaller group of volunteers. In the initial study, the researchers assigned the participants to either make predictions of how much they would change in the future or how much they had changed in the past—but not both—so the researchers couldn’t be sure that different individuals were interpreting the personality criteria in the same way. They focused on 613 adults who provided answers about both future change and past change, and the discrepancy between predictive and past change remained. Most of them predicted that they would change less over the next decade than the majority of people who reported they had actually changed. Their predictions fell short, however. In other words, people who thought they “loved” and would always prefer Rice Chex to Corn Chex became less rigid by their 50s. By their late 60s, they seemed not to care as much, which may owe partly to declining mental acuity but may also reflect a genuine change in the strength and intensity of personality and preferences.
The paper presents other data: older people are less willing to pay for the same concerts and meals than younger people expect they would, and they are less likely to remember the name of their closest friend. However, that could be because older people are simply less enthused by familiar pleasures and have worse memories.
Whether people change—can change, do change, actually change—is indeed one of the most important questions in psychobiology. The Science paper advances our understanding of the answer incrementally: we understand that we have changed, but we are uncomfortable with the idea that we will change any further. The need to change implies another question: Do we need to correct a flaw? It’s unlikely that any amount of science can answer that question.
Hi, I am John Smit a Captain in Fire Department City of Newyork with over years of experience in the field of Firefighting and HSE. My passion for fire safety started when I was a young boy and witnessed a neighbor’s house go up in flames along with precious lives. Since then, I had dedicated my life to ensuring the safety of buildings, properties, and individuals in case of a fire and medical emergencies.