The development of the end of history illusion

• In Event: Scientific Folk Theories

Abstract

The decisions we make about our futures—getting married, choosing a college major, getting a tattoo—depend on our beliefs about whether we are likely to have the same preferences and values in the future. When adults look back on their lives, they see themselves as having changed substantially in the preceding decade. However, when they look a decade into the future, they predict that they will remain largely the same—an asymmetry known as the end of history illusion (EHI) (Quoidbach et al., 2013). Previous research has found this bias to be present in adults from age 18 to 68, although the size of the effect decreases with age. This raises the question of how the EHI develops earlier in life. Although younger adults exhibit a large EHI, children are experiencing a time of enormous change and growth, and thus might be less likely to believe that they have stopped changing. This predicts that young children might be less susceptible than adults to this illusion, and more likely to correctly predict that they will change substantially in the future. It also suggests that the EHI may appear as a U-shaped curve over the lifespan, with young children and older adults less susceptible to the illusion than older children and young adults.

To investigate the development of the EHI, we conducted 2 experiments with children aged 4-11 years. In Experiment 1, we asked 180 children to identify ten current preferences (e.g., What is your favorite song?). We then asked half of them whether their preferences had been different one year ago, and the other half whether they thought their preferences would be different one year in the future. Like adults, children were overall more likely to say their preferences have changed in the past (41%) than that they will change in the future (32%), X2(1) = 7.88, p = .005, see Fig. 1. Older children were more likely to report past change than younger children, X2(1) = 12.12, p = .013, but children across all ages were equally reluctant to predict that their preferences would change in the future, X2(1) = .23, p = .633.

Experiment 2 replicates and extends Experiment 1 using a within-subjects design. Data collection is nearly complete; to date we have collected data from 70 children aged 4-11, with 10 participants remaining. Preliminary analyses suggest that children at all ages show the EHI even within the same subject, believing, for example, that their favorite song will not change by next year even though they have just reported that it has changed since last year.

These results reveal that even young children experience the illusion that their current self represents the end of their development. This illusion increases with age during childhood, because older children become more aware of past change, yet, like adults, fail to extrapolate this to predicting future change. Taken together with past findings, the developmental trajectory of the EHI suggests that the period of the late teen years and early twenties represents the time of greatest illusion about the stability of oneself across time.

Authors

• Alexa Sacchi, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Melissa Finlay

• Christina Starmans, University of Toronto