THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYAs you’d expect, the teenagers outperformed the children, but the key
finding is that the teens, even the seventeen-year-olds, made more errors
on the task than adults. The researchers said their finding was consistent
with the imaging research showing that the brain continues maturing
right through to early adulthood.
ARE TODAY’S YOUTH REALLY MORE EGOTISTICAL?
With their swagger and sarcasm, the youngsters of today can seem full
of themselves. But are they really? Or is it simply that we’re stuck on
an endless loop, such that each successive older generation eyes their
juniors with suspicion, wondering why they’re so pleased with them-
selves? According to a 2008 study, young people today really are more
egotistical than in previous generations. A team led by Jean Twenge
at San Diego State University trawled through published and unpub-
lished data on self-reported undergraduate narcissism dating from the
late 1970s to the present day, uncovering 85 samples involving 16,475
university students. These studies had asked young people to complete
the “Narcissistic Personality Inventory”, which features forty alternative
statements to choose between, such as “I can live my life anyway I want
to” or “People can’t always live their lives in terms of what they want”.
The results showed that levels of self-reported narcissism had risen
year on year from the late 1970s to today, with the effect that two thirds
of contemporary students scored above the narcissistic average for
students tested in the years 1979–85. We should be careful before gener-
alizing from these results – the study only looked at samples from the
US, and only involved young people at university. Also, the researchers
didn’t look at contemporary adult egotism – perhaps we’ve all grown
more full of ourselves.
Before we move onto adulthood and old age, it’s important to
mention that not everyone subscribes to the stereotype of stroppy teens
and the role played by their maturing brains. In 2007, the psychologist
Robert Epstein wrote an article for Scientific American Mind entitled “The
myth of the teen brain”. Epstein’s main point was that many of the
teenager brain-imaging findings were just as likely to be a consequence
of cultural attitudes and the treatment of teenagers in western cultures,
as to be a cause of what we think of as stereotypical teenage behaviour.
He pointed to surveys he had conducted showing, for example, that
teenagers in the USA have ten times as many legal restraints placed
on their behaviour as adults. He suggests that it’s little wonder teens