At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become, and then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on. The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret?
U svakoj fazi naših života donosimo odluke koje će duboko utjecati živote ljudi koji ćemo postati, i kada postanemo ti ljudi, nećemo uvijek biti oduševljeni odlukama koje smo donijeli. Tako mladi ljudi prilično skupo plaćaju da bi odstranili tetovaže koje su kao tinejdžeri također skupo platili. Ljudi u srednjim godinama se žure rastaviti od ljudi koje su kao mlade odrasle osobe žurili oženiti. Stariji odrasli naporno rade da bi izgubili ono za što u srednjim godinama naporno rade da bi dobili. I tako dalje i dalje i dalje. Pitanje koje me, kao psihologa, fascinira je zašto donosimo odluke koje "budući mi" tako često požalimo?
Now, I think one of the reasons -- I'll try to convince you today — is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Is it teenage years? Is it middle age? Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.
Sada, ja mislim da je jedan od razloga -- u koji ću vas danas pokušati uvjeriti -- taj što imamo temeljnu pogrešnu predodžbu o moćnom utjecaju vremena. Svatko od vas zna da se brzina promjene usporava tijekom ljudskog životnog vijeka, tako da izgleda kao da se vaša djeca mijenjaju kroz minute ali se vaši roditelji mijenjaju kroz godine. Ali kako se zove ta čarobna točka u životu kada promjena naglo krene iz galopa u puzanje? Jesu li to adolescencijske godine? Jesu li to srednje godine? Je li to starost? Odgovor je, kako se ispostavilo, za većinu ljudi, sada, kadgod sada jest. Ono što vas danas želim uvjeriti je da svatko od nas hoda naokolo s iluzijom, iluzijom da je povijest, naša osobna povijest, upravo završila, da smo mi nedavno postali ljudi koji smo oduvijek htjeli biti i koji ćemo biti ostatak naših života.
Let me give you some data to back up that claim. So here's a study of change in people's personal values over time. Here's three values. Everybody here holds all of them, but you probably know that as you grow, 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.
Dopustite da vam dam nekoliko činjenica kako bih potvrdio tu tvrdnju. Ovo je istraživanje o promjeni u osobnim vrijednostima ljudi kroz vrijeme. Evo tri vrijednosti. Svatko ovdje ima sve tri, ali vjerojatno znate da kako odrastate, kako starite, tako se ravnoteža među ovim vrijednostima mijenja. Kako? Pa, pitali smo tisuće ljudi. Pitali smo polovicu da nam predvide koliko će se njihove vrijednosti promijeniti u sljedećih 10 godina, druge smo pitali da nam kažu koliko su se njihove vrijednosti promijenile u zadnjih 10 godina. To nam je omogućilo da napravimo zaista zanimljivu analizu, jer smo mogli usporediti predviđanja ljudi, recimo, od osamnaest godina, s izvješćima onih od 28, te raditi takvu vrstu analize kroz životni vijek.
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. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do.
Evo što smo ustanovili. Kao prvo, bili ste u pravu, promjena se zaista usporava kako starimo, ali kao drugo, bili ste u krivu, jer se ne usporava ni približno onoliko koliko mi mislimo. U svakoj dobi, od 18 do 68 godina u našem istraživanju, ljudi mahom podcjenjuju koliko promjene će doživjeti kroz sljedećih 10 godina. To smo prozvali iluzijom "kraja povijesti". Da bismo vam približili ideju veličine ovog utjecaja, spojite ove dvije linije, i ovo što vidite je da osamnaestogodišnjaci predviđaju onoliko promjene koliko kao pedesetogodišnjaci zapravo dožive.
Now it's not just values. It's all sorts of other things. For example, personality. Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality: neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years, and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years, and what we found, well, you're going to get used to seeing this diagram over and over, because once again the rate of change does slow as we age, but at every age, people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade.
No nisu samo vrijednosti u pitanju. Riječ je i o različitim drugim stvarima. Primjerice, osobnost. Mnogi od vas znaju da danas psiholozi tvrde kako postoji pet temeljnih dimenzija osobnosti: neuroticizam, otvorenost prema iskustvu, ugodnost, ekstraverzija i savjesnosti. Ponovno smo pitali ljude koliko očekuju da će se promijeniti kroz sljedećih 10 godina, te koliko su se promijenili kroz proteklih 10 godina, i otkrili smo, naviknuti ćete se gledati ovaj dijagram uvijek iznova, jer se ponovno stopa promjene zaista usporava kako starimo, ali za svaku dob, ljudi podcjenjuju koliko će se njihova osobnost pomijeniti u sljedećem desetljeću.
And it isn't just ephemeral things like values and personality. You can ask people about their likes and dislikes, their basic preferences. For example, name your best friend, your favorite kind of vacation, what's your favorite hobby, what's your favorite kind of music. People can name these things. We ask half of them to tell us, "Do you think that that will change over the next 10 years?" and half of them to tell us, "Did that change over the last 10 years?" And what we find, well, you've seen it twice now, and here it is again: people predict that the friend they have now is the friend they'll have in 10 years, the vacation they most enjoy now is the one they'll enjoy in 10 years, and yet, people who are 10 years older all say, "Eh, you know, that's really changed."
I nije samo riječ o prolaznim stvarima kao što su vrijednosti i osobnost. Možete pitati ljude o onome što im se sviđa ili ne sviđa, njihove osnovne prioritete. Primjerice, kako ti se zove najbolji prijatelj, najdraža vrsta godišnjeg odmora, najdraži hobi, najdraža vrsta glazbe. Ljudi mogu imenovati ove stvari. Onda smo pitali polovicu da nam kaže, "Misliš li da će se to promijeniti kroz sljedećih 10 godina?" a polovicu da nam kaže, "Je li se to promijenilo kroz prošlih 10 godina?" I otkrili smo, kao što ste već vidjeli dvaput do sada, i evo ga ponovno: ljudi predviđaju da će im prijatelj kojeg imaju sada biti i prijatelj kojeg će imati za 10 godina, vrsta godišnjeg odmora koja im se sviđa sada je ista kao i ona koja će im se sviđati za 10 godina, no, s druge strane, ljudi koji su 10 godina stariji kažu, "Eh, znaš, to se zaista promijenilo."
Does any of this matter? Is this just a form of mis-prediction that doesn't have consequences? No, it matters quite a bit, and I'll give you an example of why. It bedevils our decision-making in important ways. Bring to mind right now for yourself your favorite musician today and your favorite musician 10 years ago. I put mine up on the screen to help you along. Now we asked people to predict for us, to tell us how much money they would pay right now to see their current favorite musician perform in concert 10 years from now, and on average, people said they would pay 129 dollars for that ticket. And yet, when we asked them how much they would pay to see the person who was their favorite 10 years ago perform today, they say only 80 dollars. Now, in a perfectly rational world, these should be the same number, but we overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability.
Je li što od ovoga bitno? Ovo je samo oblik krive predodžbe koja nema nikakvih posljedica? Ne, jako je bitno, i dat ću vam primjer zašto. To uvelike otežava naše donošenje odluka. Prisjetite se sada za sebe svog najdražeg glazbenika danas i svog najdražeg glazbenika prije 10 godina. Mogu vam pokazati svoje na ekranu kako bih vam pomogao. Pitali smo ljude da nam predvide, da nam kažu koliko bi novca sada platili da vidite trenutnog najdražeg pjevača kako nastupa na koncertu za 10 godina, i u prosjeku su ljudi govorili kako bi platili 129 dolara za tu kartu. S druge strane, kada smo ih pitali koliko bi platili da vide pjevača koji im je bio najdraži prije deset godina kako nastupa danas, rekli su samo 80 dolara. Sada, u savršeno racionalnom svijetu, ovo bi trebala biti ista brojka, ali mi pretplatimo za priliku da udovoljimo trenutnim sviđanjima jer precijenimo njihovu stabilnost.
Why does this happen? We're not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. Sorry, when people say "I can't imagine that," they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing.
Zašto se to događa? Nismo u potpunosti sigurni, ali vjerojatno ima veze s lakoćom pamćenja nasuprot težini zamišljanja. Većina nas se sjeća tko su bili prije 10 godina ali nam je teško zamisliti tko ćemo biti, stoga pogrešno mislimo da zbog toga što je teško zamisliti, nije vjerojatno da će se dogoditi. Oprostite, kada ljudi kažu "Ne mogu to zamisliti", obično govore o svom vlastitom nedostatku mašte, a ne o nevjerojatnosti događaja o kojem govore.
The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change.
Zaključak je da je vrijeme moćna sila. Transformira naše preference. Mijenja naše vrijednosti. Mijenja naše osobnosti. Izgleda da poštujemo ovu činjenicu, ali samo u retrospektivi. Jer tek kad gledamo unatrag, shvatimo koliko promjene se dogodi u jednom desetljeću. Kao da je, za većinu nas, sadašnjost čarobno vrijeme. To je prekretnica u vremenskoj liniji, trenutak u kojem konačno postajemo mi sami. Ljudska bića su rad u tijeku koji pogrešno misle da su dovršeni. Osoba koja si sada je jednako prolazna, koliko prolazna toliko i privremena kao svi ljudi koji si ikada bio. Jedina konstanta u našem životu je promjena.
Thank you.
Hvala
(Applause)
(Pljesak)