It’s all about me! Youth are more narcissistic than previous generations

The motion for our second annual VicTeach staff-student debate? “That this House lives for applause.” Head of Staff, Professor Richard Arnold, began with a fact that is self-evident to every academic: if academics live for applause,
then many a lecture fizzles out without positive reinforcement.

The student team responded with two main points. Perhaps there would be more applause if the lectures were better and they and their fellow students lived for the applause, whether it was clapping hands, clicks, likes or mentions.

It is true that our youth place more value on personal validation than previous generations. In the late 2000s, research showed that young people have become increasingly narcissistic over the past few decades.

Much of this important research came from Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University, and her colleagues, who began collecting data from college students in 1982 using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory.

Twenge has become quite a prominent scholar for exposing this creeping narcissism and trying to explain it. Social media is widely used because it offers users the opportunity to curate the versions of themselves they want to show to others. Whether that version is emphasizing their positive sides or engaging in “sadfishing” (talking about their emotional challenges to get sympathy), the focus is always on the poster. Social media is a vehicle for toxic individualism and self-promotion, Twenge says.

She and others have also suggested that generational changes in parenting play a role, as parents increasingly recognize their children’s uniqueness. Broader cultural shifts toward greater individualism and self-gratification, and rising living standards that make prosperity a cultural goal, also play a role.

Some of these things are difficult to test, but thanks to the global financial crisis of 2008, we now have some data that allows us to examine what role, for example, economic factors and materialism play in the narcissism “epidemic.”

Twenge and his colleagues updated their database of college student narcissism scores and used it to test a theory of social and human development that says economic hardship reduces individualism and increases collectivism because collective action gets us through such crises. Indeed, narcissism, reported by thousands of American college students, rose linearly from 1982 to 2008, then fell precipitously over the next six years.

In fact, narcissism levels in 2014 were back at 1990 levels. A secondary analysis using economic indicators also showed that rising unemployment was accompanied by decreasing narcissism.

Of course, this is not a real experiment. Correlation does not equal causation. Twenge suggests a number of other possible explanations, which unfortunately are also based on circumstantial evidence – for example, that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was accompanied by a discussion about the value of empathy.

I’m not sure I believe that, but I find another observation fascinating: Social media is now ubiquitous. When social media rose to prominence in the early 2000s, Twenge speculates, it was marketed as a means of self-promotion, and now that everyone is using social media for a wider range of purposes, self-promotion has been drowned out.

Another reason for hope: A review of more than 50 longitudinal studies (including one from New Zealand) has confirmed that narcissism is more common in our twenties than in our forties, fifties and sixties. As we age, we become less narcissistic. But these longitudinal studies also show that this decline is relative—the more narcissistic you are in your twenties, the more narcissistic you will be compared to your peers in your forties.