as you age, the balance of these values shifts.
So how does it do so?
Well, we asked thousands of people.
We asked half of them to predict for us
how much their values would
change in the next 10 years,
and the others to tell us
how much their values had
changed in the last 10 years.
And this enabled us to do a really
interesting kind of analysis,
because it allowed us to compare the predictions
of people, say, 18 years old,
to the reports of people who were 28,
and to do that kind of analysis
throughout the lifespan.
Here's what we found.
First of all, you are right,
change does slow down as we age,
but second, you're wrong,
because it doesn't slow nearly as much as we think.
At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set,
people vastly underestimated how much change
they would experience over the next 10 years.
We call this the "end of history" illusion.