n. The belief that one's personality and values will not change much in the future, despite knowing they have changed significantly in the past.
2015
We constantly think, "alright, this is it. I've made it, I've grown up, I've found myself… and now I'm done." There's a name for this pattern of thought: it's called the end of history illusion. We always think we've just become the people we're supposed to be and will always be.
2014
Maturity has an inevitable impact, one that we don’t fully acknowledge. When we look back, we realize how we’ve changed. But when we look ahead, we think we’ll stay the same. Harvard researchers call this phenomenon "the end of history illusion."
2014
Perhaps the best thing we can learn, by keeping in mind the End of History Illusion, is to give people a break. This might be especially applicable in the age of the internet, in that some stupid 10-year-old Wordpress blog don't [sic] necessarily represent the values of someone who is a decade older and has a completely shifted value system.
2013 (earliest)
In the studies we describe here, we showed that people expect to change little in the future, despite knowing that they have changed a lot in the past, and that this tendency bedevils their decision-making. We call this tendency to underestimate the magnitude of future change the "end of history illusion."
The name of this illusion comes from Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, which posits that politics and ideology are in their final forms:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.Here's a TED talk on the end of history illusion by Daniel Gilbert, one of the coauthors of the original study: