Hi Alexander,

The authors of the paper controlled for this (as I briefly mentioned in footnote 3 to the blog post): one of the many additional surveys they undertook asked people *how much* they had / they expected to change rather than what they had been / would be like. They found that the discrepancy between past and future persisted.

I agree with the conclusion of this study, but the method presented doesn’t seem to prove anything like it*. Suppose I currently rate myself as 6 on a 1 – 10 introvert/extrovert scale. I recognise that 10 years ago I was a 4. But when asked what my response will be in 10 years time, I don’t know whether I will become more or less extroverted, so my *best guess* is still 6. That would be true if I thought I was never going to change again (end of history illusion), but could also be true if I recognised that I was going to change but no idea of direction (which seems like the correct position as suggested by this article). I think you need to ask ‘how different do you expect this number to be’, not ‘what do you expect this number to be’.

Am I missing something?

*Going off “Half of them were also asked to complete the assessment as they believed they would have done ten years earlier, while the other half were asked to predict what they would say in ten years’ time.”