The motion for our second annual staff-student VicTeach Debate? “That this house lives for the applause”. Staff team leader Professor Richard Arnold opened with a fact self-evident to every academic: if academics live for applause, then many a lecture fizzles to an end without any positive reinforcement.
The student team responded with two main points. Maybe there’d be more applause if lectures were better and that they and their peers do live for the applause, whether it’s hands slapping together, clicks, likes or mentions.
There’s truth to the suggestion our youth may be more focused on personal affirmation than past generations. In the late 2000s, research showed young people had become increasingly narcissistic over the past few decades.
Much of this important research came from Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University, and her colleagues, who had been collecting data from students since 1982 using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory.
Twenge has become quite the celebrity scholar for proposing this narcissism creep, and for trying to explain it. Social media gets a lot of play because it provides a chance for users to curate the versions of themselves that they want others to see. Whether that version emphasises their positives or “sadfishing” (talking about their emotional challenges to receive sympathy) the focus is all on the poster. Social media is a vehicle for toxic individualism and self-promotion, Twenge says.
She and others have also suggested generational changes in parenting play a role, as parents are increasingly affirming their nipper’s specialness. Also playing a part are broader cultural shifts towards greater individualism and self-gratification, and increasing standards of living that make prosperity a cultural goal.
Some of these things are tricky to test but, thanks to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, we now have some data that allows us to look at how things like economic factors and materialism might play into the narcissism “epidemic”.
Twenge and colleagues have updated their database of student narcissism scores and used it to test a theory of social and human development that proposes economic hardship decreases individualism and increases collectivism, because collective action is what gets us through those kinds of crises. Sure enough, the narcissism reported by cohorts of thousands of American university students increased in a straight line from 1982-2008, then dropped precipitously over the next six years.
In fact, narcissism scores in 2014 were back to 1990 levels. Secondary analysis using economic indicators also showed that increasing unemployment was associated with decreasing narcissism.
Of course, this isn’t a true experiment. Correlation is not causation. Twenge suggests a number of other potential explanations that, unfortunately, are also circumstantial – for example, that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was accompanied by a conversation about the value of empathy.
I’m not sure I buy that one, but I do find another observation intriguing: social media is now ubiquitous. As social media sites grew in prominence in the early 2000s, Twenge speculates they were marketed as a way to self-promote, and now that everyone uses social media for a greater range of uses, the promotion of self has been drowned out.
Another cause for hope: a review of more than 50 longitudinal studies (including one from New Zealand) has confirmed narcissism appears higher when you’re in your 20s than when you’re in your 40s, 50s and 60s. We become less narcissistic as we get older. But these longitudinal studies also show this decrease is relative – the more narcissistic you are in your 20s, the more narcissistic you’ll be in your 40s compared with your peers.
