First, in one important sense retrospection is different from any of
the kinds of studies we have reviewed. Statistics are usually interpretedin terms of individual differences; that is, they compare one individualwith other. Saying that a person is warm means, in a certain sense, thathe or she is warmer than most other people; saying that warmth doesnot change with age means that he or she will continue to be warmerthan most people throughout life. But if we ask an individual if he haschanged, he will be making comparisons between himself as he was andhimself as he is now. He is likely to be far more sensitive to thesechanges than we are. We might find that he has risen from the 55th tothe 58th percentile in warmth—a change we could call trivial. From hisperspective, however, this change may be extremely important and thecontrast may be very vivid—just as a dieter might be impressed by aloss of 5 pounds that no one else would notice.
Second, as students of visual perception would remind us, our at-
tention is attracted by movement and contrast, not by stability andsameness. If a person is unchanged in characteristic levels of Anxiety ,Hostility , Assertiveness, Excitement Seeking, and Openness to Feelingsand Values but has changed in Gregariousness, he or she is much morelikely to notice and remark on the change in that one element than onthe stability in the other six. Our prediction of stability would be con-firmed in 85% of the cases, but we would be judged wrong because ofthe one exception. Stability is not absolute, but it is far more pervasivethan many people realize.
Finally , the question of sampling arises again. Readers under age 30
probably have experienced some personality changes in recent years,
but they should not assume that this pattern will continue. Regardlessof age, readers of this book (and lifespan developmental psychologists)are probably not representative of humanity in general. They are, for themost part, intelligent, perceptive, and curious individuals. And almostcertainly they are interested in seeing what changes age and experiencewill bring to them. In short, they begin with a bias toward findingchange and the mental acuity to spot it, no matter how subtle or small itmay be. Most people are neither predisposed nor skilled enough to rec -
ognize such changes.
We first discovered this when we began to investigate the so-called
midlife crisis (Costa & McCrae, 1978). At that time we assumed wewould find abundant evidence of a crisis; we simply wanted to docu -
ment it. (See Chapter 9 for a fuller discussion of this study .) At the end
of a standard questionnaire we asked that subjects comment in theirQualifications and Rival Hypotheses 125