Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation

The Atlantic:

Millennials are the “ME ME ME GENERATION,” writes Joel Stein for the cover of Time magazine, which is apparently a marked departure from the Baby Boomers, who were the plain old “Me Generation” (one me, no caps) and who created the “Me Decade” in the 1970s, and who coined the phrase, “But enough about me… what do you think about me?” in the 1980s when they were raising the next narcissists, Generation X.

The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58 percent more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.

About that. There is another paper over at NIH.gov that argues that that is kind of maybe completely wrong. In a 2010 paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science and titled “It Is Developmental Me, Not Generation Me,” Brent W. Roberts. Grant Edmonds, and Emily Grijalva write:

First, we show that when new data on narcissism are folded into preexisting meta-analytic data, there is no increase in narcissism in college students over the last few decades. Second, we show, in contrast, that age changes in narcissism are both replicable and comparatively large in comparison to generational changes in narcissism.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic