When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(39)

The researchers gave half their participants the bad-guy-to-good-guy bio and half the good-guy-to-bad-guy bio, and asked both groups to evaluate Jim’s overall moral character. Across multiple versions of the study, people assessed Jim’s morality based largely on how he behaved at the end of his life. Indeed, they evaluated a life with twenty-nine years of treachery and six months of goodness the same as a life with twenty-nine years of goodness and six months of treachery. “[P]eople are willing to override a relatively long period of one kind of behavior with a relatively short period of another kind just because it occurred at the end of one’s life.”22 This “end of life bias,” as the researchers call it, suggests that we believe people’s true selves are revealed at the end—even if their death is unexpected and the bulk of their lives evinced a far different self.

Endings help us encode—to register, rate, and recall experiences. But in so doing, they can distort our perceptions and obscure the bigger picture. Of the four ways that endings influence our behavior, encoding is the one that should make us most wary.


EDIT: WHY LESS IS MORE—ESPECIALLY NEAR THE END

Our lives are not always dramatic, but they can unfold like a three-act drama. Act one: the launch. We move from childhood to young adulthood, then eagerly set out to establish a foothold in the world. Act two: Harsh realities descend. We scramble to earn a living, maybe find a mate and start a family. We advance, suffer setbacks, mix triumph with disappointment. Act three: the bittersweet culmination. Maybe we’ve achieved something. Maybe we have people who love us. Yet the denouement is near, the curtain about to fall.

The other characters—our collection of friends and family—appear throughout the drama. But as Tammy English of Washington University in St. Louis and Laura Carstensen of Stanford University discovered, their time onstage varies from act to act. English and Carstensen looked at ten years of data on people aged eighteen to ninety-three to determine how their social networks and friendships shifted over the three acts of life. (The researchers themselves didn’t divide the ages by acts. I’m layering that notion on top of their data to illuminate a point.) As you can see in the chart, when people reached about the age of sixty, their number of friendships plunged and the size of their social network shrank.



This makes intuitive sense. When we leave the workforce, we can lose connections and friends that once enriched our daily lives. When our kids depart home and enter their own act twos, we often see them less and miss them more. When we reach our sixties and seventies, our contemporaries begin dying, extinguishing lifelong relationships and leaving us with fewer peers. The data confirm what we’ve long suspected: Act three is full of pathos. Old age can be lonely and isolating. It’s a sad story.

But it’s not a true story.

Yes, older people have much smaller social networks than when they were younger. But the reason isn’t loneliness or isolation. The reason is both more surprising and more affirming. It’s what we choose. As we get older, when we become conscious of the ultimate ending, we edit our friends.



English and Carstensen asked people to draw their social networks and place themselves in the center surrounded by three concentric circles. The inner circle was for “people you feel very close to, so close that it would be hard to imagine life without them.” The middle circle was for people who were still important but less close than the inner circle. In the outer circle were people the respondents felt a little less close to than the middle circle. Look at the chart that shows the size of the inner and outer circles over time.

A bit after age sixty, the outer circle begins to decline, but the inner circle remains about the same size. Then in the mid to late sixties, the number of people in the inner circle edges ahead of those in the outer circle.

“As participants aged, there was a decline in the number of peripheral partners . . . but great stability in the number of close social partners into late life,” English and Carstensen found. However, the outer and middle circle friends didn’t quietly creep offstage in act three. “They were actively eliminated,” the researchers say. Older people have fewer total friends not because of circumstance but because they’ve begun a process of “active pruning, that is, removing peripheral partners with whom interactions are less emotionally meaningful.”23

Carstensen began developing this idea in 1999 when she (and two of her former students) published a paper titled “Taking Time Seriously.” “As people move through life,” she wrote, “they become increasingly aware that time is in some sense ‘running out.’ More social contacts feel superficial—trivial—in contrast to the ever-deepening ties of existing close relationships. It becomes increasingly important to make the ‘right’ choice, not to waste time on gradually diminishing future payoffs.”24

Carstensen called her theory “socioemotional selectivity.” She argued that our perspective on time shapes the orientation of our lives and therefore the goals we pursue. When time is expansive and open-ended, as it is in acts one and two of our lives, we orient to the future and pursue “knowledge-related goals.” We form social networks that are wide and loose, hoping to gather information and forge relationships that can help us in the future. But as the horizon nears, when the future is shorter than the past, our perspective changes. While many believe that older people pine for yesteryear, Carstensen’s body of work shows something else. “The primary age difference in time orientation concerns not the past but the present,” she wrote.25