The You You Will Be

There is a new study that is getting a fair amount of media attention.  The article, "The End of History Illusion," appeared in this week's Science. The article starts with the question, "Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret?"  The authors wanted to test the idea that we are pretty poor predictors of our future selves.  We don't expect ourselves to change or grow and so make decisions today assuming that we will stay the same into the future...our preferences, tastes, and desires will be the same.

Interestingly, we are pretty good predictors of our PAST growth, we can look back at our lives and see how  different we are today from the past.  Still, we fail to project that trajectory into the future. The authors, psychologists, performed a variety of studies to determine if this effect was due to errors in memory, reporting, or interpretation and conclude that the effect is "real" and not an artifact of the design.

So, why are we so bad at predicting?  They conclude with this statement about cognitive processes, "Prospection is a constructive process, retrospection is a reconstructive process, and constructing new things is typically more difficult than reconstructing old ones...If people find it difficult to imagine the ways in which their traits, values, or preferences will change in the future, they may assume that such changes are unlikely."  Now, home builders and remodelers may disagree--new construction is probably easier than reconstruction if we are talking about a kitchen.  But isn't that only because you are constrained in reconstruction by what is there already and you have to do some de-construction first?  When we reconstruct our pasts, perhaps we do little destruction.  When we look to the future, however, there are so many options and choices, so many paths to take, so many experiences yet to have. How can we possible know where we will be?  But, knowing this we can now start to imagine a whole host of possible future selves!