In late February, the story circulated on news outlets all over North America that young people today are
narcissists. According to Professor Jean Twenge
of San Diego State University, we “tend to lack
empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favour
self-promotion over helping others.” She and four other
colleagues examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide
who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality
Inventory between 1982 and 2006. Together they concluded that positive
responses to such statements as “If I ruled the world, it would
be a better place,” “I think I am a special person,”
and “I can live my life any way I want to” indicate a
generation that is misguided and primed to harm both personal
relationships and society as a whole.
While we were bombarded with this image of
today’s young people as self-centred,
selfish, and too confident for our own good, I became curious about the
very nature of the study and how such a conclusion could have been
reached. I think most people would answer yes to the questions posed
above. As a student who has had the luxury of being a part of many
campus activities and organizations, I always felt that today’s
youth is very civic-minded and genuinely cares about the world in which
we live. Students balance school work, volunteering, off-campus work,
and a social life, all to prepare for future, fast paced,
career-oriented lifestyles. We want to be successful, but that’s
not to say we don’t define success as making the world a safer,
better educated, and more equal place for all of us to live.
When did the confidence in our ability to
mould the world into a better place become reason to worry? By looking
through the blogging commentary put forth by Twenge, she believes strongly in past generations
who, “believed that if you were brought up ‘too
high,’ you would be arrogant, self-centred,
and difficult to get along with. They probably could have done with
more emotional expression back then, but current parenting philosophies
have clearly gone too far in the other direction. We are telling kids
they are special (and thus deserve special treatment) and that they
shouldn’t care what others think (so why should they be
considerate?). We are not all Jesus. Get over it.”
It is not logical to insist that children who
are taught they are unique and special are necessarily taught to be
inconsiderate. It is also not logical to jump to the conclusion that
our generation suffers from a type of “God complex” because
our parents believe in our ability to be different and thus make a
difference. We live in a world where people are killed for their
religious beliefs, where our selfish behaviour
as a society is causing environmental crisis and where the reasons to
go to war can be blatantly fabricated by government. If there was ever
a time for a generation to really believe in their ability to be
special, to be leaders and individuals, that time is now. Conformity
and the status quo are not the answer.
It worries me that a professor/author who
jumps to such conclusions was quoted all over North America because of her ability to
take a generation and label them as broken. Even though Twenge has yet to find a scholarly journal willing
to publish her study’s findings, her conclusions were reported by
a member of the Associated Press and subsequently picked up by many of
the major news outlets including NBC, ABC, FOX and even the New York Times and Washington Post.
You can find Professor Jean Twenge’s blog at: http://genme.livejournal.com.
Her book is entitled Generation
Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive,
Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before.
