Millennials have been called the most self-obsessed generation on Earth—and their successors are coming of age in the age of selfies. However, all this grumbling and worrying may be just hype about nothing.
Research by University of Illinois personality psychologist Brent Roberts and his colleagues found little evidence to support the notion that recent waves of young adults have historically been obsessed with themselves. If anything, college students’ levels of narcissism may have declined since the 1990s. Roberts explains why the myth of the narcissism boom persists anyway.
There’s pathological narcissism, and then there’s narcissism as a standard aspect of our personalities. Your latest research includes. How do you define it?
In personality psychology, narcissism is a sense of grandiosity, arrogance, and entitlement that is more than healthy. The most common measure of this trait is the Narcissistic Personality Test, which asks people to choose between statements, one of which is usually a narcissistic trait. Scores range from zero to 40, with most people falling between 12 and 16. Most young people have a score of around 16 or 17.
So young people are more narcissistic than older people—and yet when I studied college students from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, I found a slight decline across generations. Why is it tempting to think otherwise?
Narcissism tends to decline sharply with age. So it makes sense that when older people are asked, “Do you think young people are more narcissistic?” they say, “Yes.” There’s a developmental shift that we all see: Young people are more entitled than we are, or our parents were. Then we incorrectly conclude that they are more narcissistic than we were when we were young. We fail to recognize that we’re not good at remembering who we were 20 years ago.
Your study contradicts research that has suggested that narcissism levels have been rising since the 2000s. Did your results surprise you?
I expected narcissism to be stable over time—I didn’t expect it to decline. It didn’t decline much. If you want to describe the body of research, not much has changed between generations. Most people are not narcissists. But that doesn’t usually get a headline.
