Dan Gilbert

So how does it do so?

Well, we asked thousands of people.

We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years, and the other is to tell us how much their values had changed in the last 10 years.

And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis, because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, 18 years old to the reports of people who were 28, and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan.

Here's what we found.

First of all, you're right.

Change doesn't

does slow down as we age.

But second, you're wrong because it doesn't slow nearly as much as we think.

At every age from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years.

We call this the end of history illusion.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do.

Now, it's not just values, it's all sorts of other things.

For example, personality.

Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality.

Neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness.

Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years.

What we found, once again, the rate of change does slow as we age, but at every age, people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade.

And it isn't just ephemeral things like values and personality.

You can ask people about their likes and dislikes, their basic preferences.