Improve decisions with awareness of this illusion

When we look into the past, we recognize how much personal change we’ve experienced. But when we look into the future, we underestimate how much we’ll change.

Psychologists refer to this illusion as the end of history illusion. Despite changing a lot in the past, we don't believe we'll change much in the future. Dan Gilbert is a Harvard professor, psychologist, and author of Stumbling on Happiness. Dan and his team coined the “end of history illusion” term in a 2013 article by the same name.

Dan’s article summarizes six studies on more than 19,000 individuals between the ages of 18 and 68. In the studies, researchers asked the participants two questions. First, how much have you changed in the past decade? And second, how do you predict you will change in the next decade? Individuals of all ages believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change little in the future.

Despite recognizing how much we've changed over the last 10 years, we predict we'll stay mostly the same over the next decade. At any present moment, we believe we’ve become the person we will be for the rest of our lives.

Failure to recognize this illusion of the future can lead to poor decision-making in the present. We might indulge temporary preferences with long term commitments. Or we might make decisions we later regret. Think tattoos, marriage, and large financials decisions like homes, cars, and designer clothes.

Why do we do this? No one knows for sure. Maybe it's because imagining potential change is much harder than remembering real change. So we assume we’ll stay the same because it’s difficult to imagine an alternate future.

Simple awareness of the end of history illusion can help improve decision-making.