Why the Old Look Down on the Young

Ever since the Greeks, people have been complaining that the next generation is a disappointment. Nowadays, it’s Boomers fighting with those aggravating, avocado-toast crunching, emoji-texting millennials. The feeling is seductive—but isn’t it really an illusion? After all, the old folks who are complaining were once on the receiving end of the same complaints themselves. In the 1960s, the Boomers’ parents denounced them as irresponsible hippies. Have people really been steadily deteriorating since ancient times?

In a new paper in the journal Science Advances, John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California at Santa Barbara call this feeling the “kids these days” effect. And their research suggests that it has as much to do with how we think about ourselves as it does with those darned kids.

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Studies by the Stanford psychologist Lee Ross have shown that we tend to adjust our view of our past selves to match the present. For example, we tend to think that our past political views are much closer to the ones we hold now than they actually were.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The Wall Street Journal