End-of-history illusion

One study was conducted in order to determine whether people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the future. This was done by having all individuals within the sample take a personality test. The participants were then assigned to either complete the test as they would have ten years ago or asked to complete the test in the manner they believe they would in ten years time. The differences between current personality and reported or predicted personality were then placed in a regression analysis.

This particular study revealed that the older a participant was the less personality change they reported or predicted. Despite this, the magnitude of the end-of-history illusion did not change with age as predictors consistently predicted their personality would change less over the next decade than reporters believed it changed in that time. Comparing the findings of the study with the magnitude of actual personality change found in previous sampling and the results supported the hypothesis that the discrepancy between predicted and reported personalities is due in part to errors of prediction and not errors of memory.

In order to test if the end-of-history illusion also applied to the domain of core values the researchers repeated the procedure used to test personality. After recruiting a new sample the participants were asked to indicate the importance of ten basic values for current day and then got sorted into reporting and predicting groups. For core values the researchers found that the magnitude of the end-of-history illusion existed for core values as well, and although the magnitude in this case decreased with age it was nonetheless present in all age groups of participants.

In order to verify the claim that the discrepancy being recorded was due to error of prediction and not error of memory the researchers decided to also study a domain in which memory would be highly reliable. The experimenters believed that asking an individual to remember their preferences from a decade ago would be significantly easier and more accurate than asking them to remember their personality traits or to rank their values. For the purpose of this study a new sample was recruited and once again all participants gave their current day preferences for various questions such as favorite food, favorite music, or best friend. The sample was then broken into reporters and predictors who simply recorded if their preference was different one decade ago or whether or not they expect their preference to change in the next decade.

Once again a regression analysis revealed the same results, with the end-of-history illusion present in preference change predictions. Participants consistently expected their preferences to remain relatively unchanged over the next 10 years while participants one decade older reflected on much higher levels of preference change. This reinforced the notion that the discrepancy between reporters and predictors are in part due to underestimation of predictions and not the memory error that personality and value studies may be more sensitive to.

Quoidbach, Gibert, and Wilson concluded based on this evidence that not only do people underestimate how much they will change in the future, but in doing so jeopardize their optimal decision making. The reason for the illusion has not been studied, although the researchers speculate that a resistance or fear of change may be causal.[2] Another explanation put forth by the researchers is that reporting is reconstructive while predicting is constructive. Because constructing new things is typically more difficult than reconstructing old ones, people will tend to prefer the idea of change being unlikely to the difficult alternative of imagining immense personal change. Overall the study concludes that at all ages individuals seem to believe that their pace of personal change has now slowed to a crawl, while evidence points to this being an underestimation.