Sunday, February 17, 2013

The End-Of-History Illusion

If we're to believe a recent study from psychologists at Harvard and Virginia universities, though, most of us are Londoners deep down. We labour under what they call the "end-of-history illusion", imagining that the person we are now is the final version, and that we won't change much in future. The researchers asked 19,000 people to complete personality assessments, either recalling how they'd changed in the last decade, or predicting how they'd change in the next. Then they compared the recollections of, say, 40-year-olds with the forecasts of 30-year-olds, and found that people predicted far less change than others remembered. (To make sure that the people looking back weren't misremembering, they compared those results to existing studies of how personalities change.) As one of the researchers told an interviewer, "I have this deep sense that… the core of me [is] not going to change from here on out." Selfhood's hill has been climbed.

It's easy to see how this might land us in trouble. When you assume your current preferences won't alter, you'll make bad decisions: embarking on a career or marriage, say, not with a view to its durability, but solely based on how it makes you feel now. Unmentioned in the hype surrounding the Harvard and Virginia research was the uncomfortable possibility to which this points: that the very idea of a fixed and stable self might be, somehow, erroneous. Different versions of that dizzying notion underpin the philosophy of Buddhism, and David Hume, and a thousand two-bit new age gurus. On this view,
"we" are endlessly changing patterns of molecules or thought processes; any sense of fixity or coherence is just a mental construct.


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