 You know, moving is kind of like a microcosm for making decisions about life. Oh, I'm sorry. Was that not really clear? Let me unpack it for you. There's nothing quite like moving for giving you perspective on how you've changed over the years. Lamentos buried in drawers, keeps aches and chotskies from trips you've forgotten all about, or, if you're like me, boxes and boxes of random crap from hobbies and projects you haven't touched for half a decade. Of course, along with those charming little reminders of days gone by comes the heart-clenching anxiety of choosing what stuff to keep and what stuff to get rid of. Do you really need that weird keyring your aunt Peggy brought back from her trip to Thailand? What about the huge box of Halloween decorations that you got for that party last year? These sorts of decisions are always a balance of practicality and sentimentality, but they also require a fair amount of self-knowledge, a realistic evaluation of what's actually going to be important enough to you in the future that you're willing to invest another box, another trip down to the car, and another few cubic feet of closet space for the next five years on it. Unfortunately, there are a few psychological quirks that make that significantly more difficult than it should be. In 2013, a group of researchers published a study in which they polled and tested adults aged 18 to 68, examining how much they felt they had changed in the past decade, how much their personality had actually changed, and how much they believed they would change in the next 10 years. Across the board, people in every age group exhibited the same pattern, saying, you know what? I'm a much different person than I was 10 years ago. My opinions, my life goals, my relationships, my values, a lot of that stuff has changed in significant ways. But I finally know what kind of person I really am. And apart from a few minor tweaks, I think I'm pretty much where I will be in the future. 18, 38, 68, people of every age group seemed to feel that they had finally muddled through the tumultuous past and sorted their true nature. The researchers did this phenomenon, the end of history illusion, a persistent defect in our perception of how much we change over time, continuously imagining that we've finally reached the end of the history of our psychological development. There's some debate over how significant or repeatable the finding is, but if you have access to a personal journal or Facebook post over a decade old, it's probably not hard to see suggested echoes of it. That smug, self-assured idiot thinks he's got everything figured out. The paper notes that one of the major drawbacks of the illusion is that it can cause people to overinvest in future opportunities for their current interests and preferences, because they imagine those preferences to be set in stone. To confirm this idea, test subjects were asked how much they'd be willing to pay to attend a concert by their favorite band in ten years time, and how much they paid today to listen to their favorite band from ten years ago. As expected, comparing people's responses across different age ranges, they consistently overestimated how valuable that concert would be to their future selves by around 61% on average. That's a serious problem. Prediction is hard enough without needing to wrestle with a persistent bias for the stuff I'm currently into, correctly extrapolating what I'm actually going to care about in a decade's time is absolutely critical for planning out my future, whether that's going to college, getting a job, choosing a partner, or deciding how much shelving I need to buy for my library. It turns out there's a right and a wrong way to go about making those sorts of predictions. Another group of scientists measured the effects of introspection on a person's general effectiveness and life satisfaction. You might expect that people who spent a lot of time ruminating on their own nature would be best equipped to figure out their quintessential characteristics and choose the right behaviors to maximize their future happiness. The researchers certainly thought that that would be the case, but they were dead wrong. People who spent significant amounts of time reflecting had inferior outcomes than their less introspective peers, and the more they reflected, the worse off they were. They were less satisfied with their relationships and their jobs. They felt more stressed out and less in control of their lives. They were more depressed, more anxious, tended to be more self-absorbed, and get this, they actually exhibited inferior self-knowledge. If you're like me and spend a fair amount of time cogitating, that's probably a troubling finding, and it was certainly surprising to the scientists who discovered it. What's going on here? Well, introspection can describe many different sorts of mental activities, some of which are more or less helpful for picking out one's persistent character traits. When the authors started differentiating between styles of introspection, they found two categories that stood out, what and why. Thinking about why they were a particular way, or why they exhibited certain behaviors, led test subjects to produce simplistic and largely unhelpful explanations, basically settling on the first answer they could think of that wasn't too problematic for their self-esteem, and generating support for that answer. They didn't investigate alternative explanations and weren't particularly receptive to helpful criticism. Why do I have so much junk? Well, it's probably because I'm a frugal person. Yeah, that's it. I hate wasting money buying stuff, but I just threw away, so I save everything that might be useful. I'm not a hoarder, I'm just fiscally responsible. On the other hand, test subjects who thought hard about what sort of behaviors they were exhibiting were much more in tune with the reality of their personalities, and much more receptive to constructive criticism. The weird negative effects of introspection didn't seem to apply when they were focused on what sort of things they actually did, rather than trying to dream up some deep truth about what made them do those things. This dichotomy between why and what introspection might play a significant role in our capability to make accurate predictions about our future selves, possibly because we changed so much over the years. If we get caught up trying to develop some theory about the immutable core of our whole being and projecting our future behavior based on that theory, it's not really so surprising that we'd fail miserably. Maybe we'd be better off guessing that our behaviors, rather than our psychology, will be what persist. There's an echo of my episode about overfitting and reference class forecasting here. Rather than going nuts trying to work out the rules by which we operate, it can be a decent guess that we're just going to keep on doing more or less the same things that we've always done. By that standard, it's probably a bad idea to try and figure out why I have 50 unfinished projects and little boxes scattered about my bedroom, and instead pay attention to what I know about my behavior, that I seem to start a lot of projects and not finish them. It's not likely to be helpful to try and work out what quirk of my personality makes me do that, but considering how many of those projects I've picked back up and finished off, it's probably a safe bet that future me won't be too sad if I scrap them instead of keeping them in my closet. Do you feel like you've finally figured out who you really are? What do you think about why introspection versus what introspection? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. 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