In each of the following pairs, respondents are asked to choose the statement with which they agree more:
"I have a natural talent for influencing people," or: "I am not good at influencing people."
"I can read people like a book," or: "People are sometimes hard to understand."
"I am going to be a great person," or: "I hope I am going to be successful."
These are some of the 40 questions on a popular version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. It may seem like a just-for-kicks quiz on par with "Which Superhero Are You?" but the test is commonly used by social scientists to measure narcissistic personality traits. (Choosing the first statement in any of the above pairings would be scored as narcissistic.)
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 their top goals were fortune and fame.
"Anything we do that's political always falls flat," said Ricky Van Veen, 27, a founder and the editor in chief of CollegeHumor.com, a popular and successful Web site. "It doesn't seem like young people now are into politics as much, especially compared to their parents' generation. I think that could lend itself to the argument that there is more narcissism and they're more concerned about themselves, not things going on around them."
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.
Some scholars point out that bemoaning the self-involvement of young people is a perennial adult activity.
"The children now love luxury," Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. "They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."
Others warn that if young people continue to be labeled selfish and narcissistic, they just might live up to that reputation.
"There's a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Kali Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario.
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.
Trzesniewski said her study is a response to widely publicized research by Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who along with colleagues has found that narcissism is much more prevalent among people born in the 1980s than in earlier generations.
Twenge's book title summarizes the research: Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before.
Twenge attributed her findings in part to a change in core cultural beliefs that arose when baby-boom parents and educators fixated on instilling self-esteem in children beginning in the 1970s.
"We think feeling good about yourself is very, very important," she said in an interview. "Well, that never used to be the case back in the '50s and '60s, when people thought about `What do we need to teach young people?'"
She points to cultural sayings as well -- "believe in yourself and anything is possible" and "do what's right for you."
"All of them are narcissistic," she said.
"Generation Me" inspired a slew of articles in the popular press with headlines like "It's all about me," "Superflagilistic, Extra Egotistic" and "Big Babies: Think the Boomers are self-absorbed? Wait until you meet their kids."
Twenge is working on another book with W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, this one tentatively called The Narcissism Epidemic.
However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.
"It's like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don't grow up," said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Arnett, the author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties, has written a critique of Twenge's book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.
Arnett and other scholars suggest several reasons why the young may be perceived as having increased narcissistic traits. These include the personal biases of older adults, the lack of nuance in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, changing social norms, the news media's emphasis on celebrity, and the rise of social networking sites that encourage egocentricity.
Richard 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," Eibach said. "It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you're receiving may have changed."
Trzesniewski gave as an example of this bias a scene from the film Knocked Up, in which new parents drive their baby home from the hospital at a snail's pace. The road, of course, is no more or less dangerous than before the couple became mother and father. But once they make that life transition, they perceive the journey as perilous.
Indeed, the transition to parenthood, increased responsibility and physical aging are examples of changes in individuals that tend to be the real sources of people's perceptions of the moral decline of others, write Eibach and Lisa Libby of Ohio State University in a psychology book chapter exploring the "ideology of the Good Old Days," to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. (They also report that perceptions of social decline tend to be associated with conservative attitudes.)
Twenge and Trzesniewski used the inventory in their studies, though they chose different data sets and had opposite conclusions. Each said their data sets were better than the other's for a host of reasons -- all good, but far too long to list here.
Twenge, who has read Trzesniewski's critique, said she stands by her own nationwide analysis and has a comprehensive response, along with another paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality. It reads in part, "their critique ultimately strengthens our case that narcissism has risen over the generations among college students."
Arnett dismisses tests like the inventory.
"They have very limited validity," he said. "They don't really get at the complexity of peoples' personality."
Some of the test choices -- like "I see myself as a good leader," -- "sound like pretty normal personality features," he said.
Twenge said she understands that sentiment but that the inventory has consistently proved to be an accurate measure. (She calls it "the boyfriend test.")
"There's a fair number of personality tests that when you look at them they may seem odd, but what's important is what they predict," she said.
Test or no test, Arnett worries that "youth bashing" has become so common that accomplishments tend to be forgotten, like the fact that young people today have a closer relationship with their parents than existed between children and their parents in the 1960s -- "They really understand things from their parents' perspective," Arnett said -- or that they popularized the alternative spring break in which a student opts to spend a vacation helping people in a Third World country instead of chugging 40s in Cancun.
"It's the development of a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood," Arnett said. "It's a temporary condition of being self-focused, not a permanent generational characteristic."
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