I touched on this a while back...

[badrose]

So called millennials, who were born roughly between 1988 and 1994, tend to have this characteristic as a 2016 study found.

The University of Hampshire found that youngsters who were studied on issues of entitlement scored 25 per cent higher than people aged 40 to 60 and 50 per cent higher than those over that age bracket.


https://www.indy100.com/article/youn...search-7867961

[PedroDaGr8]

Time to put my scientist hat on:

1. Their definition of millennials is very strange, the general accepted age birth year range is 1981 to 1997 give or take a year or so. I have never even once seen the age range given in the article as being millenials. Source: am borderline between Gen X and Millennial and show traits of both. The general definition of millenial is that they were coming of age or growing up around when the millennium transition occurred.
   
2. This article is very poorly written, their links go to other poorly written articles rather than the original research and/or presentations.
   
3. Neither of these discount the results exactly(yet), but can certainly discount the interpretation and cast the data in a negative light. Let's talk about the possible flaws:
   
   1. For example, why did they change the age range to this highly limited range? This strikes to me of statistical searching where the initial dataset didn't show anything so they kept massaging variables until they either found something abnormal or they found the result they wanted. This is a huge issue with mining datasets, the nature of statistics and the 95% confidence interval. The definition of this interval says that 5% of the time you will get a positive value when there is none. The more random tests you do, the more likely you are to finding a random "false" link.
   2. The article makes no mention on whether the results are a median or mean. This is a HUGE and very important distinction, as the article is discussing things as if the study was talking about the median. This is important because if it was the mean value, a few HIGHLY narcissistic people can absolutely raise the levels significantly if a group if the overall level is very low across all age ranges. Similarly, if those who are narcissistic are getting much more narcissistic between the age ranges while the overall population is essentially unchanged then the mean will still rise but the median will not. Your story goes from generation blah is getting more narcissistic to the narcissists in generation blah are getting worse. Two entirely different stories with entirely different outcomes, treatments, etc.
   3. There is no mention of the baseline values versus the new values, using percent increases on their own without a frame of reference is a cop-out and just really bad reporting. Kinda like the studies you see that X raises your risk of cancer 4000%, then you look into the details and you find out that it raises your risk from 0.00000001% to 0.0000004%.
   4. Related to the above, not including the error range in this study is common bad reporting. If my old average was 0.006% +/- 0.0005% (CI95) and my new average is 0.0010% +/-0.0006%, my average didn't actually change.
4. Considering they don't link to the article and I can't seem to find a pdf of it, I can't even validate the results. Selection bias in limited population size studies is a HUGE problem. This is a COMMON issue in pieces that are designed to play to particular groups feeling of superiority, such as intelligence, age, race, etc. You will see that the author of the article either misquotes the study or finds flawed studies designed to support an outcome. That is far from the only case though and it is a huge issue in science in general, most scientist are aware of it and try to handle it but some are bad scientists or they intentionally don't account for it. The vaccines cause autism is a prime example of this, the doctor specifically selected certain patients and excluded others that didn't match his desired outcome

Truth be told, the situation is a bit complex. There are certainly signs of increased entitlement in the millennial generation, but the question is how much of it is real. Some of that is the internet, bad decisions now become world news that everyone knows. Some is that younger people have always shown more entitlement than their elders, age and reality has a tendency to mellow that out very well. I look at myself as a teen and I certainly behaved very self-centeredly (some would say entitled) due to naivety and stupidity. Talking with my parents and grand-parents they, and their Note: This is not a generational thing, it is a group think thing and is an issue in many areas. When one of your own groups displays a trait they are a "bad actor" because you don't have that trait and you know others that don't therefore they are the exception not the rule. Meanwhile when someone of another group does something wrong, that person is automatically a representative of the group. You don't see the individuals that don't do said action because their action is normal. You don't question the circumstances that lead to said action because either you can't relate or it just doesn't happen. You aren't a part of the group so you can't use your own behavior as a barometer. You just see the ones that do that and it becomes a mental feature of that group in your mind. The reason is, mentally, we have an innate need to categorize and group like things together (it eases cognitive processing greatly) and this includes people. Couple that with the innate in-group/out-group phenomenon and you end up there. All of a sudden that group tends to do X, while it may or may not be true that X is unique to them. Narcissism could certainly be one of those things.

Personal belief, I am of the opinion that yes narcissism has gotten more noticeable. As mentioned before, whether this is because the narcissists are getting worse, because it is getting more common, or "a lil column A, a lil column B" is not really obvious. I am also not entirely sold on the fact that it entirely a unique thing to this generation. I know a good number of entitled and borderline narcissistic Boomers and Gen Xers. When I worked in customer service, it was WAY more often to be a person in their 50s and older to behave in a narcissistic manner than it was someone in their teens and twenties. Doubly true if they were older and rich, they felt heavily entitled because they were old and rich and had "paid their dues" and I was young, not rich and in their eyes "beneath them". Despite the fact, they had never "paid their dues" to me, therefore I owed them nothing more than the customer service I gave to everyone. It is fun to talk about "everyone gets a prize culture" and what not, but the reality is that is more of a generational superiority view than and if anything lays the blame directly at the Boomer/Gen X parents than the Millennials anyways. It is interesting research but whether the increase is real, due to age, due to better diagnostic ability now (much like increased autism rates), etc. is really not known. Trying to claim anything to the contrary at this time is entirely generational stereotyping.

[badrose]

Excellent post, Pedro, as always. I don't think we're that far apart. My experience regarding narcissism is that it doesn't occur in a vacuum, it has to be enabled. Several years ago I had a father & son come in to buy a suit as the son was about to go to college. I'd learned early on how to size up a customer before selecting a suit for trying on and the young man selected a nice charcoal grey with good quality. The jacket fit well and they decided to go with it. So, he comes out of the dressing room and stood facing the mirror. The jacket, as I recall needed little adjustment as well as the pants except he had pushed the waistline down to where it rested on his hips which, in turn, brought the crotch halfway down to his knees and IMO it looked terrible. I suggested he raise them back up some to which the father said to leave it where the son had it. So, I did. Not my money.

Another example would be the rise of "trophy kids" who got trophies regardless of achievement by the individual or team. That translates to other areas such as job performance, group affiliation, community, and a deep lack of acceptance to being told "no." Again, this doesn't apply to all millennials and it most certainly doesn't occur in a vacuum.