Laura Carstensen

What's most exciting, actually, about this whole line of work is we've been able, in most cases, to just lift age out of the equation and say, it's time.

It's our beliefs.

It's our perceptions.

It's our ideas.

our sense of a future that affect the goals that we pursue in everyday life.

Yes.

You can compare returning sophomores to graduating seniors and their social preferences for spending time with others.

And as you've anticipated, the returning sophomores are interested in meeting new people and the graduating seniors are not interested in meeting new people.

They're interested in spending time with their very good friends.

We ran an experiment where we asked exactly that question.

We thought, wow, we can make young people old.

Can we make old people young?

And so in one study before we asked people to choose from among an array of social partners, we said, now imagine that you just received a phone call from your physician who told you about a new medical advance that virtually ensures you'll live about 20 years longer than you expected and relatively good health.

Who do you choose?

And now older people were no longer expressing preferences for these very well-known friends and loved ones.

They were interested in exploration and novelty too.

I believe that there are.

So occasionally I'll give a talk to a largely young audience about these findings and somebody inevitably comes up to me after the talk and says, how do I get to be more like an old person?

I'd really like to be that.

And then what I say is it's not a good idea.