[fclnywau] Do people change?

Do people change?  Can people change?  Or is change an illusion of people developing into whom they were destined to develop?

Define change either as movement along a predestined path toward a predestined destination or goal (in which case, yes, people obviously change), or movement of the path or goal itself.  The latter definition is weirder but more interesting, so is the subject of this post.

Of course, this question has shades of the philosophical question of free will.

"Path" is a fuzzy concept, probably needing to encompass the multitude of possibilities due to external stimuli or effects from the environment yet to occur.

If people have free will, then they can change.  If they do not, then the person they are, encoded in a snapshot in time, serves as a perfect predictor of their entire future behavior, so there is a constancy -- a lack of change -- in the person that they are, as they progress into their future.

The fuzziness of question can be sharpened by invoking the concept of prediction.  If people can change, predicting their future behavior for a given contingency is difficult; they might have changed between now and then; predictions are inaccurate.  If not, predictions can be accurate.  Note well, the future contingency has to occur to know whether the prediction given the contingency is accurate.

What if predictions are accurate not because people can't change, but because social forces external to a person are too powerful?  Though it continues to be a tricky question because social forces could be the thing forcing someone not to change.

One of the powerful psychological mechanisms preventing change is identity.

Inspired by ideas that you can tell how a person will turn out from a relatively young age: their identity has solidified by (say) their teenage years.  (Assuming future conditions are known, e.g., assumed similar enough to today.)