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本帖最后由 满仓 于 2013-1-9 09:39 编辑
【中文标题】我们的性格一直在变化 － 即使你不那么认为
【原文标题】Our Personalities Are Constantly Changing, Even if We Think They’re Not
【登载媒体】时代周刊
【原文作者】Laura Blue、John Cloud
【原文链接】http://healthland.time.com/2013/01/04/our-personalities-are-constantly-changing-even-if-we-think-theyre-not/
科学刊物很少涉及哲学话题，但是本周的《科学杂志》中有一篇文章，开头是“为什么人们总是在做一些他们将来一定会后悔的决定？”18岁的时候，骷髅头纹身是个无可争议的好主意，但是到了28岁，它就变成了一种耻辱。你在25岁时遇到了梦中的白马王子，但是到了35岁，梦想变化了，最终只好离婚。
哈佛大学心理学教授、《无意中发现的幸福》一书作者Daniel Gilbert说：“即使到了68岁，人们还是会说，我已经和58岁不一样了，但78岁时我肯定还是像现在这样。”
这个问题比较明显的答案是，人们在不断成长，就像英国政治家本杰明•迪斯累里所说，“变化是不可避免的”。但是，比利时国家科研基金组织的几位研究人员——Gilbert、Jordi、Quoidbach——和弗吉尼亚大学的心理学家Timothy Wilson，花了4个月时间，收集了19000人的意见之后，发现即使人们都认为他们在过去十年里发生了很多变化，但并不相信这种变化会持续下去。大部分人都否定现实中的证据，认为现在的自己和未来的自己并不会有很大区别。
例如，参加调查的33岁人群对未来十年里变化程度的预期，要小于43岁人群对过去十年里已经发生过的变化程度。文章中提到：“人们似乎都认为自己处于一个分水岭，他们现在的样子将会永远持续下去。”当然，性格和价值观随着年龄的增长也会趋于稳定，但是人们普遍低估了未来性格变化的程度。研究人员称这种现象为“历史终结幻觉”。
幻觉是一个宏大的认识论问题，这也是为什么研究人员会招募那么多研究对象的原因之一。数千名参与者中大部分通过一个网站被召集在一起，这个网站的赞助方是一个法国真人秀节目《幸福的秘密》。经过分析志愿者对最喜欢的音乐、食物、习惯，以及朋友和度假地的选择等问题的回答，Quoidbach、Gilbert和Wilson比较了不同年龄阶段的人们，得出以下结论：
1，年龄越大，越不承认自己过去和未来会有变化。这个结论并不出乎意料，多年来，研究人员已经确认了一个常识性的结论——人的性格和喜好会随着年龄的增长而更加稳定。你的80岁的祖父批评自己反对的政党，肯定比他在65岁时更加激烈。年轻人都认为他们自身的品格都是优点，他们很难想象自己的信仰和价值观将会发生巨大的变化——尽管我们大多数人都曾将多次改变过自己的观点。
2，同样，人们愿意承认自己的性格和偏好在过去发生了变化，但不认为未来变化还会继续。调查参与者中有3808人不是法国电视台招募的，而是来自麦克阿瑟基金会，研究人员比较了这些人对自我性格认定的变化。这些人在90年代中期完成过一份性格调查问卷（整个活动的名称叫做MIDUS——美国人的中年发展），然后在00年代中期又做了一次同样的调查。MIDUS所调查的是所谓“大五项”性格特点：尽责、随和、情绪稳定（有时也称为“神经质”）、开放、外倾。（你可以在这里测试你自己的“大五项”。）
大五项调查因其可靠性而被广为接受，科学家们因此假设90年代中与00年代中调查结果的区别，可以准确刻画出人们在尽责、随和、情绪稳定、开放、外倾几个方面与十年前有什么样的变化。研究人员接下来请调查参与者预估，他们的大五项得分与十年前相比变化了多少；十年后还会有怎样的变化。大部分人比较准确地判断出过去十年里大五项分数的变化，但是对未来十年分数的变化，他们的判断与实际情况相差很多。简言之，人们更容易错误地预测，但不容易错误地回忆。
为了进一步印证他们的发现，研究人员在一小组人群中又进行了一次研究。在上一次调查中，研究人员让参与者预测他们未来的变化，或者评价已经发生过的变化——但不是两项调查都要做，这样科学家就无法确定，这中间的差异是否是由不同人群对性格评价标准理解不一致造成的。他们选取了613个成年人，分别评价过自己未来和过去的变化，结果差异依然存在。大部分人预测他们在未来变化的程度，要小于过去的变化程度。也就是对未来缺乏预见性。换句话说，那些原本认为自己永远会更喜欢大米麦片，而不喜欢玉米麦片的人，到了50岁之后都会变得不那么坚持了。到了60岁，他们似乎更不在乎了，部分原因在于头脑不那么敏捷了，但也说明人的性格和偏好的确发生了一些变化。
文章还提供了其它一些数据：年轻人预测他们在未来愿意花钱听音乐会或者外出就餐的程度，大于老年人实际愿意花钱做这些事的程度，而且老年人不大容易记起自己好朋友的名字。但这或许仅仅是因为他们对家庭活动不大感兴趣，并且记忆力开始衰退了。
人们是否变化——有能力变化、主动去变化、变化了没有——毫无疑问是精神生物学领域里最重要的问题之一。《科学杂志》这篇文章让我们洞悉到一部分问题的答案：我们知道自己变化了，但是不愿意承认还会进一步变化。对变化的需求暗示出另外一个问题：我们需要改正缺点吗？这个问题恐怕任何科学界的理论都无法回答了。
原文：
It’s rare that scientific journals explicitly engage philosophical conundrums, but a paper in this week’s Science magazine begins with the question: “Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret?” At age 18, that skull-and-crossbones tattoo seems like an unimpeachably cool idea; at 28, it’s mortifying. You meet the man of your dreams at 25 — except that your dreams have become so different by 35 that you end up divorced.
“Even at 68, people think, Ugh, I’m not the person I was at 58, but I’m sure I’ll be this way at 78,” says one of the Science study authors, Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the book Stumbling on Happiness.
An obvious answer to the question is that people mature — that “change is inevitable,” as British politician Benjamin Disraeli said, that “change is constant.” But after examining the responses of more than 19,000 people gathered over four months in 2011 and 2012, the researchers— Gilbert, Jordi Quoidbach, of the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium, and University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson — discovered that even though most people acknowledge that their lives have changed over the past decade, they don’t believe change is constant. Against all evidence, most people seem to believe that who they are now is pretty much who they will be forever.
For example, the average 33-year-old surveyed expected less change over the next decade than the average 43-year-old reported actually had occurred over the past decade. As the paper says, “People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.” Although personality and values do tend to become more stable with age, people generally underestimate the extent of future personality shifts. The researchers call this phenomenon “the end of history illusion.”
Proving an illusion is a giant epistemological problem, which is one reason the authors recruited so many participants for their study — although many of the thousands were recruited from a website sponsored by a French reality show, Leurs Secrets du Bonheur (The Secrets of Happiness). Analyzing the answers that the volunteers provided to questions about their favorite music, food, hobbies, as well as about choices concerning friends and vacations, Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson compared people at different stages of life and came to a couple of conclusions:
1. The older you get, the less you believe you have changed or will change. This finding isn’t surprising: for years, researchers have confirmed the common-sense idea that one’s personality and preferences become more stable with age. At 80, your grandfather will likely disparage whichever political party he opposes with more ferocity than he did at 65. As the Science research explains, even young people feel their current qualities are good qualities. They find it hard to imagine their beliefs and values could significantly change — even though most of us actually change our views often as time progresses.
2. In a similar vein, people have a tendency to recognize that their personalities and preferences have changed in the past but misunderstand that personalities and preferences often change in the future. As part of the research, the researchers compared how self-reported personality traits had changed among 3,808 adults recruited not by that French TV show but by the MacArthur Foundation. The participants had completed a personality survey (as part of a larger study called MIDUS, or Midlife Development in the United States) in the mid-1990s and then again in the mid-2000s. Among other things, MIDUS measures what are called the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability (sometimes called neuroticism), openness to experience and extroversion. (You can test your Big Five here.)
The MIDUS surveys are widely accepted for their reliability, so the scientists assumed that any difference between scores in the mid-1990s and those in the mid-2000s accurately captured changes in how much people are conscientious, agreeable, stable, open and extroverted today vs. 10 years ago. The researchers then asked the participants to estimate how much their MIDUS measures would have changed from 10 years ago and how much they will change in 10 years. Most people were pretty good at estimating the difference in average MIDUS scores over the past decade, but they dramatically underestimated how much MIDUS scores change for most people in the future. In short, people may commit errors of prediction more often than they succumb to errors of memory.
As further insurance that the effect they were tracking was real, the researchers conducted another study with a smaller group of volunteers. In the original experiment, the researchers assigned the participants to either make predictions of how much they would change in the future or how much they had changed in the past — but not both — so the scientists couldn’t be sure that different people were interpreting the personality criteria in the same way. They focused on 613 adults who provided answers about both future change and past change, and the discrepancy between predictive and past change remained. Most of them predicted that they would change less over the next decade than the majority of people who reported they had actually changed. Their predictions fell short, however. In other words, people who thought they “loved” and would always prefer Rice Chex to Corn Chex became less adamant by their 50s. By their late 60s, they seemed not to care so much, which may owe partly to declining mental acuity, but may also reflect a real change in the strength and intensity of personality and preferences.
The paper shows other data: older people are less willing to pay for the same concerts and meals than younger people anticipate they would, and they are less likely to remember the name of their best friend. But that could be because older people are simply bored by familiar pleasures and have worse memories.
Whether people change — can change, do change, actually change — is surely one of the most important questions in psychobiology. The Science paper advances our understanding of the answer incrementally: we understand that we have changed, but we are uncomfortable with the idea that we will change any further. The need to change implies another question: Do we need to correct a flaw? It’s not likely that any amount of science can answer that question.
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发表于 2013-1-9 09:35
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发表于 2013-1-9 12:26
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