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 svakom periodu svog života donosimo odluke koje će duboko uticati na živote ljudi kakvi ćemo postati, a onda, kada postanemo ti ljudi, nismo uvek oduševljeni odlukama koje smo doneli. Dakle, mladi ljudi skupo plaćaju da uklone tetovaže koje su kao tinejdžeri skupo platili da bi ih stavili. Sredovečni ljudi požuruju da se razvedu od osoba koje su kao mladi požurili da ožene. Stariji odrasli naporno rade da izgube što su kao sredovečni naporno radili da steknu. Iznova i iznova. Pitanje, koje me kao psihologa, fascinira je zašto donosimo odluke koje naše buduće mi tako često zažali?
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.
Mislim da je jedan od razloga - pokušaću da vas ubedim večeras - taj što imamo u osnovi pogrešno shvatanje o moćnom uticaju vremena. Svako od vas zna da se brzina promena usporava tokom ljudskog životnog veka, da izgleda da se vaša deca menjaju kroz minute, ali se vaši roditelji menjaju kroz godine. Ali kako se zove taj magični trenutak u životu gde promena iznenada pređe iz galopa u milenje? Da li su to adolescentske godine? Srednje godine? Da li je starost? Odgovor, ispostavilo se, za većinu ljudi je - sada, kad god bilo to sada. Želim da vas ubedim danas da svi mi šetamo naokolo sa iluzijom, iluzijom da je istorija, naša lična istorija, upravo završena, i da smo tek nedavno postali ljudi kakvi smo oduvek mislili biti i bićemo takvi ostatak 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.
Daću vam neke podatke koji podržavaju tu tvrdnju. Ovo je istraživanje o promeni u ličnim vrednostima ljudi tokom vremena. Evo tri vrednosti. Svi ovde imaju sve tri, ali verovatno znate da kako odrastate, kako starite, ravnoteža između ovih vrednosti se menja. Kako se to dešava? Pa, pitali smo hiljade ljudi. Pitali smo polovinu da nam predvide koliko će se njihove vrednosti promeniti u narednih 10 godina, a ostale da nam kažu koliko su se njihove vrednosti promenile u poslednjih 10 godina. To nam je omogućilo da uradimo veoma interesantnu analizu, jer nam je omogućeno da uporedimo predviđanja ljudi, recimo, od 18 godina, sa izjavama ljudi od 28, i da uradimo takvu analizu kroz životni vek.
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 šta smo otkrili. Kao prvo, u pravu ste, promena se usporava kako starimo, ali kao drugo, grešite, zato što ne usporava ni približno onoliko koliko smo mislili. U svakom uzrastu, od 18 do 68, u našem istraživanju, ljudi veoma potcenjuju koliko promene će doživeti u sledećih 10 godina. Mi to zovemo iluzijom "kraja istorije". Da bih vam dao ideju o veličini ovog efekta, povežemo ove dve linije, i ovde vidite da 18-godišnjaci predviđaju promenu isto koliko i 50-godišnjaci.
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.
Nisu to samo vrednosti. Ima tu raznih stvari. Na primer, ličnost. Mnogi od vas znaju da psiholozi danas tvrde da postoji 5 osnovnih crta ličnosti: neuroticizam, otvorenost ka iskustvu, saradljivost, ekstrovertnost i savesnost. Pitali smo ljude koliko očekuju da se promene u sledećih 10 godina, kao i koliko su se promenili u predhodnih 10 godina, i šta smo otkrili? Navići ćete se da iznova gledate ovaj dijagram, zato što, ponovo, brzina promene usporava kako starimo, ali u svakom uzrastu, ljudi potcenjuju koliko će se njihova ličnost promeniti u sledećoj deceniji.
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 to nije samo prolazna stvar, kao što su vrednosti i ličnost. Možete pitati ljude šta vole a šta ne vole, njihove osnovne sklonosti. Na primer, ko vam je najbolji prijatelj, omiljen način odmora, koji vam je omiljeni hobi, koja vam je omiljena muzika. Ljudi vam mogu reći te stvari. Polovinu njih smo pitali: "Mislite li da će se to promeniti u sledećih 10 godina?" a drugu polovinu smo pitali: "Da li se to promenilo u poslednjih 10 godina?" I otkrili smo, videli ste već dvaput i evo ga ponovo: ljudi predviđaju da su prijatelji koje imaju sada oni koje će imati i za 10 godina, da odmor u kome najviše uživaju sada uživaće i za 10 godina, a opet, ljudi koji su 10 godina stariji, svi kažu, "Eh, znate, to se zaista promenilo."
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.
Da li je išta od ovoga važno? Da li je ovo samo pogrešno predviđanje koje nema nikakve posledice? Ne, prilično je važno, i daću vam primer zašto. To značajno otežava naše donošenje odluka. Prisetite se sada vašeg omiljenog muzičara danas i vašeg omiljenog muzičara pre 10 godina. Postavio sam svog na ekran da vam pomognem. Pitali smo ljude da predvide i da nam kažu koliko bi novca danas platili da vide svog omiljenog muzičara na koncertu za 10 godina i u proseku, rekli su da bi platili 129 dolara za kartu. A opet, kada smo ih pitali koliko bi platili da vide muzičara koji im je bio omiljen pre 10 godina, kako nastupa danas, rekli su samo 80 dolara. U savršeno racionalnom svetu, ovo bi trebalo biti isti broj, ali mi pretplaćujemo mogućnost da zadovoljimo naše trenutne prioritete zato što precenjujemo 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 verovatno ima veze sa lakoćom pamćenja naspram težine zamišljanja. Većina nas se može prisetiti kakvi smo bili pre 10 godina, ali nam je teško da zamislimo kakvi ćemo biti za 10 godina, i onda pogrešno mislimo da pošto nam je teško da zamislimo male su šanse da će se i desiti. Izvinite, kad ljudi kažu: "To ne mogu da zamislim," uglavnom pričaju o sopstvenom nedostatku mašte, a ne o neverovatnosti događaja koji opisuju.
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.
Suština je, vreme je moćna sila. Ono menja naše sklonosti. Ono menja naše vrednovanje. Ono menja našu ličnost. Mi izgleda cenimo tu činjenicu, ali samo u retrospektivi. Samo kada pogledamo unazad shvatimo koliko se promena desilo u deceniji. To je, za većinu, kao da je sadašnjost magični trenutak. To je kao prekretnica na vremenskoj liniji, To je momenat u kome konačno postajemo mi. Ljudska bića su "radovi u toku" koji pogrešno misle da su završeni. Osoba koja ste trenutno podjednako je prolazna, nestalna i privremena kao što ste uvek i bili. Jedina konstanta u našim životima je promena.
Thank you.
Hvala.
(Applause)
(Aplauz)