See also
- Pessimistic induction – a similar phenomenon observed in scientific beliefs
- Personal identity § Theories
The end-of-history illusion is a psychological illusion in which individuals of all ages believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future. [1] Despite recognizing that their perceptions have evolved, individuals predict that their perceptions will remain roughly the same in the future.
The illusion is based on the fact that at any given developmental stage, an individual can observe a relatively low level of maturity in previous stages. The phenomenon affects teenagers, middle-aged individuals, and seniors. In general, people tend to see significant changes in hindsight, but fail to predict that these changes will continue. For example, a 20-year-old's prediction of how great a change they will undergo in the next ten years will not be as extreme as a 30-year-old's recollection of the changes they underwent between the ages of 20 and 30. The same phenomenon is true for people of any age. [2]
One of the key researchers of end-of-history, psychologist Daniel Gilbert, gave a TED talk about the illusion. [3] Gilbert speculates that the phenomenon may occur because of the difficulty of predicting how one will change or a satisfaction with one's current state of being. [4] Gilbert also relates the phenomenon to the way humans perceive time in general. [4]
The term "End of History Illusion" originated in a 2013 journal article [1] by psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson detailing their research on the phenomenon and leveraging the phrase coined by Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book of the same name. The article summarizes six studies on more than 19,000 participants between the ages of 18 and 68. These studies found underestimation of future changes to personality, core values, and preferences as well as explored some of the practical consequences of these underestimations.
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, Gilbert, 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.
The original study that suggested the end-of-history illusion, which was led by Jordi Quoidbach, has been met with criticism for its use of a cross-sectional study rather than a longitudinal study, which would have lent itself better to the long-term nature of the effect. Critics are also skeptical of the reliability of autobiographical memory. [5]
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is insuperable for most people, but they can manage it, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills.
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as the mental discomfort people feel when their beliefs and actions are inconsistent and contradictory, ultimately encouraging some change to align better and reduce this dissonance. Relevant items of information include peoples' actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people do all in their power to change either so that they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Methodologies to examine wishful thinking are diverse. Various disciplines and schools of thought examine related mechanisms such as neural circuitry, human cognition and emotion, types of bias, procrastination, motivation, optimism, attention and environment. This concept has been examined as a fallacy. It is related to the concept of wishful seeing.
Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.
The group attribution error refers to people's tendency to believe either
In psychology, the false consensus effect, also known as consensus bias, is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances". In other words, they assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population.
In the psychology of affective forecasting, the impact bias, a form of which is the durability bias, is the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future emotional states.
Rosy retrospection is a proposed psychological phenomenon of recalling the past more positively than it was actually experienced.
The planning fallacy is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed. This phenomenon sometimes occurs regardless of the individual's knowledge that past tasks of a similar nature have taken longer to complete than generally planned. The bias affects predictions only about one's own tasks. On the other hand, when outside observers predict task completion times, they tend to exhibit a pessimistic bias, overestimating the time needed. The planning fallacy involves estimates of task completion times more optimistic than those encountered in similar projects in the past.
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance is a phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own. In this phenomenon, most people in a group may go along with a view they do not hold because they think, incorrectly, that most other people in the group hold it. Pluralistic ignorance encompasses situations in which a minority position on a given topic is wrongly perceived to be the majority position, or the majority position is wrongly perceived to be a minority position.
Affective forecasting, also known as hedonic forecasting or the hedonic forecasting mechanism, is the prediction of one's affect in the future. As a process that influences preferences, decisions, and behavior, affective forecasting is studied by both psychologists and economists, with broad applications.
The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources which rely on collective human knowledge. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.
Compliance is a response—specifically, a submission—made in reaction to a request. The request may be explicit or implicit. The target may or may not recognize that they are being urged to act in a particular way.
In social psychology, illusory superiority is a cognitive bias wherein people overestimate their own qualities and abilities compared to others. Illusory superiority is one of many positive illusions, relating to the self, that are evident in the study of intelligence, the effective performance of tasks and tests, and the possession of desirable personal characteristics and personality traits. Overestimation of abilities compared to an objective measure is known as the overconfidence effect.
The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others' mental states from their behaviour.
The "hot hand" is a phenomenon, previously considered a cognitive social bias, that a person who experiences a successful outcome has a greater chance of success in further attempts. The concept is often applied to sports and skill-based tasks in general and originates from basketball, where a shooter is more likely to score if their previous attempts were successful; i.e., while having the "hot hand.” While previous success at a task can indeed change the psychological attitude and subsequent success rate of a player, researchers for many years did not find evidence for a "hot hand" in practice, dismissing it as fallacious. However, later research questioned whether the belief is indeed a fallacy. Some recent studies using modern statistical analysis have observed evidence for the "hot hand" in some sporting activities; however, other recent studies have not observed evidence of the "hot hand". Moreover, evidence suggests that only a small subset of players may show a "hot hand" and, among those who do, the magnitude of the "hot hand" tends to be small.
The psychology of music preference is the study of the psychological factors behind peoples' different music preferences. One study found that after researching through studies from the past 50 years, there are more than 500 functions for music. Music is heard by people daily in many parts of the world, and affects people in various ways from emotional regulation to cognitive development, along with providing a means for self-expression. Music training has been shown to help improve intellectual development and ability, though minimal connection has been found as to how it affects emotion regulation. Numerous studies have been conducted to show that individual personality can have an effect on music preference, though a recent meta-analysis has shown that personality in itself explains little variance in music preferences. These studies are not limited to American culture, as they have been conducted with significant results in countries all over the world, including Japan, Germany, Spain, and Brazil.
The frequency illusion is a cognitive bias in which a person notices a specific concept, word, or product more frequently after recently becoming aware of it.
Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future.
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