A recent Time cover story calls the generation of young adults known as millennials “lazy, entitled narcissists”.
Writer Joel Stein says 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 US National Institutes of Health; 58 percent more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.
How do you measure narcissism? By getting people to talk about themselves. In the 2008 study that Stein cites, researchers did face-to-face interviews with more than 30 000 participants to test them for symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, which the paper described as a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, interpersonal exploitiveness, and lack of empathy”.
To be diagnosed as clinically narcissistic, a respondent had to admit to at least one symptom that “caused social or occupational dysfunction”.
The study diagnosed 9.4 percent of respondents aged 20 to 29 with the disorder, compared with 3.2 percent in respondents aged 65 and older.
Measuring narcissism is a thorny issue because each researcher culls data from different data sets, then applies different algorithms to analyse those, then reaches conclusions.
As an article at the Atlantic pointed out , many psychologists have disputed the study Stein cited about millennials being singularly narcissistic.
And while the study found incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is inversely related to age, its authors say the disorder “may be more prevalent among young adults due to developmental challenges in the transition from adolescence to adulthood”.
There’s debate in psychology over whether narcissism should be considered a clinical disorder at all or whether it’s simply a stop on the continuum of natural human emotion.
Some psychologists tried unsuccessfully to remove the disorder from the new fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
But are young adults today actually more narcissistic than their elders, or is young adulthood a generally selfish stage of human development? Some experts say there’s no real way to find a definite measure for NPD among the hazy definitions, shifting cultural norms, and evolving technology. – Washington Post-Bloomberg