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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?

在我们生命的每个阶段, 我们都会做出一些决定, 这些决定会深刻影响未来我们自己的生活, 当我们成为未来的自己时, 我们并不总是对过去做过的决定感到高兴。 所以年轻人花很多钱 洗去当还是青少年时花了很多钱做上的纹身。中年人急着跟年轻时迫不及待想结婚的人离 婚。 老年人很努力的挥霍着作为中年人时不停工作所赚的钱。 如此没完没了。 作为一个心理 学家,让我感兴趣的问题是,为什么我们会做出让自己将来常常后悔的决定?

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. 我认为其中一个原因——而我今天想说服你们的——就是我们对时间的力量有个基本的错 误概念。 你们每个人都知道变化的速度随着人的年龄增长不断放慢, 孩子们好像每分钟都有 变化, 而父母们的变化则要慢得多。 那么生命中这个让变化突然间从飞速变

得缓慢的神奇转 折点应该叫什么呢?是青少年时期吗?是中年时期吗?是老年阶段吗?其实对大多数人来 说,答案是,现在,无论现在发生在什么。今天我想让大家明白的是,我们所有人都在围绕 着一种错觉生活,这种错觉就是,我们每个人的过去,都已经结束了, 我们已经成为了我们 应该成为的那种人,在余下的生命中也都会如此。

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. 我想给你们展示一些数据来支持这个观点。 这是一项关于人们的个人价值观随时间变化的研 究。这里有 3种价值观。每个人的生活都与这三个价值观相关,但是你们可能知道,随着 你们慢慢长大, 变老, 这三个价值观的平衡点会不断变化。 到底是怎么回事呢?我们询问了

数千人。我们让他们当中一半的人预测了一下在未来 10年中,他们的价值观会发生多大的 改变,让另一半人告诉我们在过去的 10年中,他们的价值观发生了多大的变化。这项调查 可以让我们做一个很有趣的分析, 因为它可以让我们将大约 18岁左右的人的预测同大约 28岁左右的人的答案相比较,这项分析可以贯穿人的一生。

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 \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.

这是我们的发现。 首先, 你们是对的, 随着我们年龄的增长, 变化会减缓。 第二, 你们错了, 因为这种变化并不像我们想象的那么慢。在我们的数据库从 18岁到 68岁的每一个年龄段 中,人们大大的低估了在未来的 10年他们会经历多少变化。我们把这叫做“历史终止”错 觉。为了让你们了解这种影响有多大, 你们可以把这两条线连接起来,你们现在看到的是 18岁的人群预期的改变仅仅和 50岁的人群实际经历的一样。

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.

现在不仅仅是价值观了。 其他的方面都也有变化。 比如说,人格。 你们当中的很多人知道现 在心理学家们认为人格可以分为五个基本维度:神经质性,经验汲取度,协调性, 外向性和 道德感。回到原来的话题,我们问人们他们期待未来的 10年中自己会有多大的变化,以及 他们在过去的 10年中发生了多少变化,我们发现了,你们会习惯不断地看到这个图表,因 为又一次, 变化速率随着我们的年龄增长减慢了。 但是在每一个年龄阶段, 人们都低估了在 未来的十年中他们的人格会发生多大的改变。

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,