Cognition

Volume 250, September 2024, 105867
Cognition

Forever young: The end of history illusion in children

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105867Get rights and content

Abstract

The “end of history” illusion in adults (Quoidbach et al., 2013) is an asymmetrical pattern in which people accept that they've changed in the past but don't believe they will change in the future. We explore here whether the same psychological forces that cause the illusion in adults exist in the minds of children. Two studies with 4- to 11-year-olds (N = 256) suggest that they do, even in a within-subject design where the same child is asked questions about the past and the future. A third study (N = 83) finds that this illusion does not persist when children are asked about other people. These studies suggest that even young children believe that although they used to be different in the past, from this point on, they will remain forever young.

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Open practices statement

The data and materials for all Experiments are publicly accessible at https://osf.io/hbszw/?view_only=3f03f667d1884cc2b8b3f412dcc31882. The studies were not pre-registered.

Participants

One hundred seventy-eight North American children aged 4 to 11 years were recruited from a lab database (mean age = 8.02 years; SD = 2.27 years; age range = 3.90–12.01 years; 51% girls, 49% boys). Thirty-eight additional participants were tested but excluded from the data analysis (see below for details). We set the desired sample size at 20 participants per year of age. However, due to multiple overlapping modalities of data collection, we collected data from 18 additional participants. We

Experiment 2

Experiment 1 suggests that 4-to-11-year-old children believe they have changed more in the past than they will change in the future. However, it is possible that our participants who were asked about past change interpreted questions about change in a different way than participants who were asked about future change. Faced with a similar concern, Quoidbach et al. (2013) replicated the effect using a within-subject design, and we do the same here. In addition, previous studies have found that

Experiment 3

Experiment 1 and 2 suggest that 4-to-11-year-old children exhibit the same end of history illusion as adults (Quoidbach et al., 2013)—they remember that their preferences have changed in the past, but believe that from here on out, they will change very little. Does this asymmetry extend to their intuitions about other people? That is, do children think that other children have changed more in the past than they will in the future?
The theories discussed above about the mechanism behind this

General discussion

In our first two experiments, we find that 4- to 11-year-old children remember that their preferences have changed in the past, but believe that from here on out, they will change very little. This cannot simply be an accurate reflection of the development of preferences, since there is a mismatch between children's reports of change and their predictions of change for the same time period. Thus, children, like adults, exhibit an “end of history” illusion when thinking about change in

Funding

This work was supported by a grant to CS from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Alexa Sacchi: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Jessica Sah: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Melissa Finlay: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology. Christina Starmans: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

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