CONNECTIONS: Maybe Every Generation Is the Me Generation

Thirty-seven-year-old Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D., author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever, is duking it out with baby boomers for the title of chief narcissist. “Baby boomers were sometimes called the ‘Me Generation’ in the 1970s, but this was a premature and brief label: Boomers did not discover the self until young adulthood, and even then did everything in groups. . . . Generation Me has never known a world that put duty before self, and believes that the needs of the individual should come first.”
    But according to a new study, she’s wrong. Psychologist Kali Trzesniewski and colleagues at the University of Western Ontario measured narcissism — a personality trait encompassing characteristics like arrogance, exhibitionism, and a sense of entitlement — in more than 25,000 college students from 1996 to 2007, then compared their data to similar studies conducted in the late 1970s to mid-1980s and found no evidence that levels of narcissism had increased. Levels of the tendency to hold unrealistically positive beliefs about the self were also assessed in high school seniors, and showed no prominent increase on this component of narcissism. (See Psychological Science, February 2008).