Imagine yourself a decade from now; you're likely to picture
someone pretty much like yourself â?? with maybe a little less
hair and a few more wrinkles. But if you think back to how you
were a decade ago, you're likely to see a substantial
difference. The younger you probably had different values,
different interests, different ambitions. People tend to see the
future as much more like today, discounting how much they've
changed over time, according to a new study from Harvard and
University of Virginia, entitled "The end of history illusion."
The view that all our changes are in the past leads to mistakes
of prediction, such as when a 20-year-old gets a tattoo â??
unable to believe that its appeal will wear off some day,
according to study author and Harvard psychology professor
Daniel Gilbert. These judgment errors also have financial
consequences, he says, leading us to overestimate how much
something will be worth to us in the future. In one part of the
study, published Thursday in the journal Science, r