Gen Z really is different

I love to write about narcissists, but I feel I have written so much about them that I am starting to bore my audience. So, even though, I am going to write about narcissism again today, it is actually a story about people becoming less narcissistic.

There is a relatively well-known study in psychology from 2008 that showed that students over time scored higher and higher on the narcissism scale of personality tests. To be sure, in these personality tests, narcissism is a dimension that relates to higher individualism, self-centeredness and self-esteem and only at the extremes do we find the people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) that we generally think of when we hear the word ‘narcissist’. But obviously, if the average person scores higher on narcissism, it is likely that we also have more people with NPD in our society.

Increase in narcissism score of US college students

Source: Twenge et al. (2008)

But in 2008 something important happened: The global financial crisis. Not only did the US experience its worst recession since the Great Depression it also experienced a rather anaemic recovery with slow growth for a decade.

In previous work, I have discussed how the economic conditions during our formative years (age 18-25) define our outlook on life. People who live through a recession during their formative years are far more in favour of unemployment benefits and redistribution of wealth than people who live in prosperous times during their formative years. Similarly, people who experience tough times during their formative years act less selfishly and are more interested in the common good than people who experience good times.

In other words, people who have been in their formative years during and after the global financial crisis should score lower on the narcissism scale than previous generations. And this is indeed what a follow-up study found. There is a remarkable decline in narcissism scores after 2008 visible in the data.

Decline in narcissism score after 2008

Source: Twenge et al. (2021)

Younger millennials and Gen Z act much less selfishly than older Millennials, Gen X or the Baby Boomers. For them, the system that made the US and most industrial nations wealthy after World War II really is broken. They have an objectively harder time finding jobs and progressing in their careers to get higher salaries simply because over the last 15 years job creation and job progression were stymied by lower growth in the economy overall. Similarly, people who start their careers in a recession earn about 10% less during their lifetime than people who start their careers in normal times. And as growth remains low, the likelihood to lose the job you have increases. And every time someone loses their job, lifetime earnings decline again.

Is it any wonder that the people who entered the job market since 2008 feel the need for better social welfare systems and in general are hyper-sensitive to real or perceived injustices, such as racial disparities?

Personally, I think much of what has been done by social justice warriors in recent years has gone overboard. Defining your pronouns is not going to reduce bias against LGBTQ+ people. Similarly, every time I hear someone talk about ‘lived experience’ I want to scream because anecdotes are not data.

But often, I do see the point of certain movements once I realise my own biases. I was raised during prosperous times and my formative years were spent in the early 1990s. I am much more inclined to believe in self-determination and individualism because of that. The generation entering the job market today has a different viewpoint. Older people like me and my fellow Gen Xers need to realise this and understand that people like Greta Thunberg are not an outlier but representatives of a generation of people that is much more socially minded than their parents or grandparents. And given the large number of problems we have that can only be solved via global cooperation rather than individual action, that might be a good thing.