Transplanting a Seattleite

I think the results are credible and pretty paradoxical too. You might think that since strategic planning for the future can have enormous fitness consequences for humans we might have a more robust conscious vision of our future selves this study indicates.

I'd like to offer an explanation of why we have the documented end of history illusion that is really on an evolutionary level of analysis, as opposed to a classical psychological (hypothetical constructs) or proximate level. Humans depend for their fitness on reasonably stable social exchange contracts. Multi-partner contractual reciprocity is the basis for everything as a person moves thru life. To garner the needed social exchange relationships, social partners have to see us as reasonably predictable. They have to feel they can effectively and efficiently “mentalize” us, that is, formulate a “theory of mind” that will predict our future behavior as we surf the vicissitudes of life together. One good way to help others feel they can easily predict us is to actually believe, and so more convincingly be able to represent, that we are not going to change much going forward. So, this illusion, like many other mental mechanisms that cause us to create highly subjective views of self and reality, is probably an evolutionary adaptation to help us favorably manage the models that social partners build of us, to encourage them to see us as predictable and reliable long-term social exchange partners. It helps us establish fitness-enhancing contracts.

Maybe most of our (undoubtedly dynamic) visions for what we will become in the future, and our strategies for getting there, are held subconsciously, so as to minimally “upset” our social networks.

– Paul J. Watson, Dept. of Biology, University of New Mexico.