What Plague of Narcissism?

Jean Twenge is one of our hottest celebrity psychologists these days. Her specialty is abusing young people for narcissism. Her 2006 book, Generation Me, sold 200,000 copies. Its message:

By comparing decades of personality test results, Dr. Twenge has concluded, over and over again, that younger generations are increasingly entitled, self-obsessed and unprepared for the realities of adult life. And the blame, she says, falls squarely on America’s culture of self-esteem, in which parents praise every child as “special,” and feelings of self-worth are considered a prerequisite to success, rather than a result of it. “There’s a common perception that self-esteem is key to success, but it turns out it isn’t,” she said. Nonetheless, “young people are just completely convinced that in order to succeed they have to believe in themselves or go all the way to being narcissistic.” 

I say, hogwash.

I know lots of young people. I have a whole house full of them, I have taught dozens at a middling college, and I regularly work closely with recent college graduates. I have never met a young narcissist.

If the young people I know suffer from anything, it is anxiety. I know, personally, two or three who have taken this all the way to crippling agoraphobia. The one young person I know with narcissistic tendencies has ended up in a terrible rut because his sense that he ought to be special wars with a deep anxiety that keeps him from ever trying anything; his belief that he ought to be great makes failure intolerable to him, so his lack of real confidence keeps him on the sidelines.

The last time I taught as an adjunct, my orientation was almost entirely about how to recognize the signs of a psychological crisis in my students and how to get them help. The most common reason students drop out of college now is mental illness, mainly depression and anxiety.

My sense is that the anxiety of young Americans today is fed by estrangement from the adult world of careers and such. Young people are anxious partly because they have no idea how to navigate the transition to adult life. My elder daughter was just telling me about an online acquaintance who keeps saying she can't wait to be thirty because by thirty she will have somehow solved all those terrible looming problems of young adulthood -- finding a home, a career, and a spouse -- and then everything will be great. Anxiety about school is partly a reflection of this underlying fear, since people have been told that if they don't get good grades they will never get a decent job.

I think that if our parenting has any special flaw that sets it apart from past parenting it is not too much praise but too much coddling. I think our reluctance to let children run in neighborhood packs and climb trees with rotten limbs and whatever else may protect their bodies, but at the price of weakening their spirit. People who are never in danger don't get braver, it seems, but more timid. But then again I have worked hard to avoid that sort of thing myself, and my children seem on average much like their peers.

So I am pleased to report that lots of real psychologists, the ones who take data seriously, also think that Jean Twenge's work is crap:

“I think she is vastly misinterpreting or over-interpreting the data, and I think it’s destructive,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a research professor in psychology at Clark University. “She is inviting ridicule for a group of people about which there are already negative stereotypes.” . . .

And some critics are even more emphatic: they say the data, if collected and read correctly, simply show no generational difference in narcissism. “We calculated self-esteem scores from 1976 all the way up to 2006,” said Brent Donnellan, a psychologist at Michigan State University, referring to his and colleagues’ 2010 study using data from an annual national survey of high school students called Monitoring the Future, “and we didn’t see much difference at all.”