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Conventional wisdom, supported by academic studies using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, maintains that today’s young people — schooled in the church of self-esteem, vying for spots on reality television, promoting themselves on YouTube — are more narcissistic than their predecessors. Heck, they join Facebook groups like the Association for Justified Narcissism. A study released last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press dubbed Americans age 18 to 25 as the “Look at Me” generation and reported that this group said that their top goals were fortune and fame.

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Yet despite exhibiting some signs of self-obsession, young Americans are not more self-absorbed than earlier generations, according to new research challenging the prevailing wisdom.

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“There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Ms. Trzesniewski, along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.

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Originally posted by rural - Francesca:
Personally I'd rather have a "Baby Boomer Bashing" session. You want to talk self absorbed!!!

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Well, we might be able to have our cake and eat it too! The guy said young people were no more self-absorbed than 30 years ago - 1977.

ETA: make that 1978!

[ 22 January 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]

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Personally I'd rather have a "Baby Boomer Bashing" session. You want to talk self absorbed!!!

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Well I think the people that are complainging about how self-absorbed this generation is are boomers. "How dare they talk about themselves it's taking all the attention away from ME!!!"

On a more serious note I agree with one commentator in the article these personality inventories are pseudoscience with virtually no validity. I remember my Stats prof raising the irony of giving someone a self-report questionaire on Machiavelianism, if you're highly Machiavelian you're not likely to tell everyone.

I think there a culture of Narcisism has been promoted since the end of WW2 and this is just a part of the broader forced consumption patterns that drive global capitalism. Self-absorption increases consumption and reduces resistance, just the way it should be,pass me the remote.
and naturally the youth are blamed for being narcisistic rather than recognizing the dominant cultural forces that are dictating it.

[ 22 January 2008: Message edited by: N.R.KISSED ]

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Well, we might be able to have our cake and eat it too! The guy said young people were no more self-absorbed than 30 years ago - 1977.

ETA: make that 1978!

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Originally posted by M.Gregus:

This is true! After all, the study didn't say that young people are NOT self-absorbed - just that they are not any MORE self- absorbed than older generations. Which means they could potentially be very self-absorbed.

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They know more because of information being readily available to them and I think this also scares them because they know things that we probably would not have known or had access to.

Combine these two threads and what we have is a generation that is both self-absorbed and apathetic.

Feministing also responded to the New York Times article that M. Gregus posted, saying:

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We've been called apathetic. We've been called selfish. We've been called cheaters. We've been called petty. We've been called appearance obsessed. We've been called Generation Y, Millenials, Echo Boomers, the Look at Me Generation, and now, well, it's all been boiled down to simply Generation Me.

I'm, frankly, a little sick of the whole thing. The New York Times just ran a story about a new study that puts into question the previous wisdom on our generation--namely that MySpace, Oprah, and Free To Be You and Me has made us all narcissistic.

SNIP

The study was done, in part, as a response to the work of Jean M. Twenge who wrote Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Twenge is already at work on another book, this one with an even more damning title, The Narcissism Epidemic (by the by, could we all agree on a definition for what constitutes an epidemic? It's getting a little ridiculous).

I appreciate this Yale fella's response:

Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,” Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.”

Is it really us, people, or might it just be a little bit about you? Are older folks projecting their own unmet needs on an entire generation? Now that's narcissism.

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I think for a lot of our young people, they don't engage because they feel no one is listening.

The older generations screwed up the planet and now it's up to them to fix it, yet no one is listening.

I know here we are trying to get youth involved and provide activities for them and often we run into roadblocks and NIMBY issues.

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Originally posted by rural - Francesca:
Thanks for the link to the other thread.

I think for a lot of our young people, they don't engage because they feel no one is listening.

The older generations screwed up the planet and now it's up to them to fix it, yet no one is listening.

I know here we are trying to get youth involved and provide activities for them and often we run into roadblocks and NIMBY issues.

Becuase the Boomers have economic clout, all the development and investment is going to service them, not to the needs of young people.

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I think it is largely true that the perspectives of young people are ignored, exactly because of Boomer clout.

the boomers have been pandered to for 60 years now. Today everything is about their health, their nostalgia, their music, their sexuality, their hobbies like restoring "classic cars", their values.

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I think for a lot of our young people, they don't engage because they feel no one is listening.

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Or they feel overwhelmed.

There was a a few months back that showed a woman with a million different issues, in thought bubbles, floating around her head. I think a lot of people feel so overwhelmed that they don't know what to do to contribute to everything that is going on around them

[ 23 January 2008: Message edited by: jrose because her URL will not embed!]

[ 23 January 2008: Message edited by: jrose ]

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Originally posted by 1234567:

My kids used to always say that they thought we humans don't have much time. I can't recall thinking that way, nor any of my friends when I was a teen.

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I did. (Remember "The Limits to Growth", for example?) But I was a complete weirdo. Still am.

ETA: I also felt completely overwhelmed. (Again, a "complete weirdo".)

[ 23 January 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]

To get an idea of what I mean, compare some of today's magazines with the issues 50 or 60 years ago. There was were so many more do-it-yourself projects - everything from building a small boat to building a tube power supply for a car radio to play in the house. Cars were much easier to work on. Today, it's become a considerable task to change the plugs on some.

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Originally posted by bliter:
...., compare some of today's magazines with the issues 50 or 60 years ago. There was were so many more do-it-yourself projects - everything from building a small boat to building a tube power supply for a car radio to play in the house. Cars were much easier to work on. Today, it's become a considerable task to change the plugs on some.....

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I think there are just as many (proportionally) do-it-yourself books /magazine /projects today. The topics have just changed

- astronomy and other natural science
- home recording studio
- composing music / singer-songwriter
- digital photography / movie making (You Tube and Myspace come to mind)
- diy video games creation
- graphic design (web pages for local and national companies)

I think kids are just as creative as ever, their tools have just changed. Not your grandfather's hobbyist.

Just because baby boomers and senior citizens are not interested in, or can't relate to what kids are doing today, doesn't mean that young people are not engaged in something creative. In fact young people are sometimes the onces to create new tools to approach old interests in new ways.

[ 23 January 2008: Message edited by: TemporalHominid ]