Ted Talk

I watched a Ted Talk called “The psychology of your future self” by Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, which examined why people often make decisions that their future selves often regret. This is interesting as there are many stereotypes about teenagers getting tattoos or piercings at a young age, which they might regret when they mature into adults. Gilbert observed that as people get older however, one’s rate of change slows down dramatically, and that adolescents change more often than someone’s grandparents. Additionally, these changes which form someone into a better person may seem to happen rather quickly, but actually they take a lot of time to progress and develop slowly over the years. This slow process of change may someone believe that they actually haven’t changed, until they realize it in a certain moment while looking upon their past. Gilbert states that in a survey of different age groups and their predicted rate of change, many people underestimated how much they were going to change in their life. Specifically, the age group of 18 year olds anticipated changing just as much as 50 year olds actually do. Therefore, in reality there are many significant life changes that one goes through, whether it be their personality, beliefs, or values. In each of these categories in a prediction of change for ten years, the same prediction is concluded that people underestimate the rate of change that will occur. Thus, we overestimate our current preferences because it has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. To explain, we remember who we were years ago, but find it a bit difficult to imagine who we are going to be, and because we think that it’s hard to imagine, we think that it’s less likely to happen. I liked how Gilbert used personal examples and statistics to get his point across to explain how this phenomenon works.