Narcissism Up In College Students; The Goal Is To Keep Them In ...
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-11-13 11:49:30
The authors offer a helpful analogy: if the average student in the 1980s scored in the 50th percentile for narcissism then the average 2006 college student scored in the 65th percentile-- 2/3 of 2006 college kids are above the 1980 mean for narcissism. Some interesting findings:the college students scored the same level of narcissism as a study of 200 celebrities. (more on that later.)Women's scores rose more rapidly than men's. In 1992 the SD between men and women was 0.45 (men higher); in 2006 it was 0.15. II. But not everyone agrees. ,disbelieving the above study (apparently even before it had beenpublished) investigates their own 25000+ gigantic sample of UC Davisand UC Berkeley students and found that scores on theNPI and their own measures of narcissism were relatively stable. Ishould mention here that the NPI measures more of the extroverted,"self-enhancing" kind of narcissism because that's important for understanding why this result is probably wrong: 40% of UC students are Asian vs. 6%in the rest of American colleges. I hope this doesn't require any explanation. III. What do Twenge et al say is the consequence of all this narcissism?
They have more trouble explaining the other.. associations: crime is down; volunteerism is up. But to me these are hardly inconsistent with narcissism. Narcissism doesn't mean you're bad just that you think you're the main character in your own movie. Maybe that movie is about a woman who works for a non-profit but manages to date the President. But the authors can't explain why narcissism is on the rise and they point to the usual suspects:
Schools and media: "Children in some preschools sing a song with the lyrics. "I amspecial/I am special/Look at me..." and many television shows forchildren emphasize positive self-feelings and specialness."
Technology: "Devices such as iPods and Tivo allow people to listen to music andwatch television in their own individual ways and websites such asMySpace and YouTube (whose slogan is "Broadcast yourself") permitself-promotion far beyond that allowed by traditional media. Thesetrends motivated Time magazine to declare that the 2006 Person of the Year was "You," complete with a mirror on the cover."
But all that's just the consequence not the cause. Look at the above chart and note the upswing after 1990. I don't know what caused those kids to be more narcissistic than the 80s kids but I do know what happened to those 90s kids after college: they became adults. And they became the custodians of the world and they demanded entertainment that suited them. Music movies internet technology-- all that was aimed at not the next group of college kids. Unfortunately for the next college kids there was nothing else to watch. The 30 year old in 2000 wanted to watch Survivor and The Bachelor so everyone had to watch Survivor and The Bachelor and it's changed cognition: even kids who have never watched those shows still uses the phrase "voted off" and "immunity." And the 35 year old in 2005 became a parent and that parent wanted school vouchers and great healthcare but also lower taxes and to be able to eat out at restaurants once a week. ('The kids are with my mother.") Those parents want easy credit and a bigger house. This trend is going to continue frankly until we either have a major recession war or my generation dies. It's funny to me and by funny I mean I dropped all my cyanide capsules that Allan Bloom and all the other conservative culture war guys from the 80s never bothered to follow up on the kids they thought were such idiots such-- narcissists. Did they expect they would all die sucked into their own skulls by the gravity as their brains went brown dwarf? Yet here they are walking around like zombies apathetically pathetically pathologically confident and cynical ironic and happy yet hungry and restless just the same. It's like they never aged past 25. You can't blame todays teens and college kids for being narcissists. They're doing exactly what they were trained to do are being told to do what they saw done by us. (You're reading it.)-----Diggs and Reddits and donations appreciated. Do you want a telethon? Is that what you want?
If their lifespan is prolonged indefinitely by science? If the technological singularity comes? (well that's just as big a change) My personal excuse for never aging past 25 is being 24. And I've known there's nothing on TV for awhile. Hence the internet and books.
If those who hate narcissism must turn elsewhere for entertainment might they encourage genuine personalities where they turn? Especially since the internet is so filled with two way communication. But if your generation is hardwired for one way communication no wonder TV panders to monopolize the captive audience.
Not sure that the use of the term "voted off" is an indicator of anything. I still use "$64,000 question" to refer to a salient query and that show went off the air over a decade before I was born. Of course at that time there wasn't a whole lot on TV so it was easier for centralized media to have a mass effect on culture and language. Everybody watched the same thing because that was all there was.
But I don't think you can have it both ways. You can't cite both the fragmenting of media (iPods. YouTube etc.) and the occasional mass-media phenomenon that still happens (Survivor) as evidence for narcissism.
Well. I guess you can but at that point you're a Calvinist. ("You can and you can't you will and you won't you're damned if you do...") Stick with the hard data. It's interesting enough without embellishment.
I should mention here that the NPI measures more of the extroverted. "self-enhancing" kind of narcissism because that's important for understanding why this result is probably wrong: 40% of UC students are Asian vs. 6% in the rest of American colleges. I hope this doesn't require any explanation.
Sorry but this really does require an explanation. That is.. some sort of empirical as opposed to anecdotal elucidation.
I'm pretty familiar with some of our disneyesque racial and cultural stereotypes but I'm sure there's some verifiable research which goes beyond such silliness. Indeed your elaboration on this point would probably keep others from erroneously jumping to conclusions.
About twenty years ago. James Masterson proposed that there exists a more subtle variety of NPD. It is not the familiar extroverted. I-am-a-celebrity NPD.
Masterson termed it 'closet narcissism'. In this type of NPD you grew up as a child with one or two NPD parents already hogging the limelight. So you didnt get to exercise age appropriate grandiosity. Instead a child in this predicament disowns his or her true self (or at least disowns some portions of his or her true self) and gets some parental nurture by mirroring the NPD parents.
So the child in this predicament grows up as a sort of lackey entourage member (my term not Dr. Masterson's) servicing and stroking the parents' mirror-hunger.
So someone in this predicament might grow up rather mousy self effacing but its not from genuine humility but from having to distort oneself into holding up a mirror and providing supplies to one or more adult caregivers who were children in adult bodies.
Someone in this predicament may not grow up as a flamboyant narcissist but may go through life mirroring and enabling other more flamboyant NPD types. They may be talented get good gradesand degrees to please the parents but end up in the entourages of more overt NPD types.
And these followers with closet narcissism might be the ones to commit crimes in loyalty to their leaders. Look at Enron.
So if this catagory of 'closet narcissism' has been recognized as a valid subtype of NPD (I read this 20 years ago and this may be a concept that never panned out) if closet narcissism has been recognized as a useful subcatagory for NPD would tests such as NPI pick it up?
I have a 15yo who is nothing like this. More importantly while I write this. I also have a 23yo music teacher downstairs. He runs three or four businesses. He teaches a wide variety of students. He has a girlfriend. He's a performer so I'm sure he has plenty of healthy narcissism in his make-up but he is a totally functioning participatory adult in the world.
There are PLENTY of young adults around like him. I find them somewhat cut off from tradition and culture; they live in a flat and mysterious world; they're easily swayed by demogogues and they lack historical perspective. But they're not like the people you're describing. I know them too. I know what you're talking about. But there are other things happening in the culture and you can unplug from the bad stuff and plug into the good stuff at any time. It's not even hard. Before the internet it was hard.
Is such narcissism not self-limiting? Everyone when they're young has a glorious ideal of themself and what they'll accomplish. Few youth strive to be the establishment. Usually eventually the real world does a good job of beating them down and tempering their expectations. It's hard to imagine you're Paris Hilton when you've been making photocopies and filing reports for 5 years.
Are the youth of today so different? I look at the 60s and my jaw drops at the sheer idealistic self-indulgent craziness of it all. I can't fathom how disruptive and alien 60s youth culture must have been following the staid 50s. As those kids aged they've at least gotten in line though not without subjecting us to drek like "The Big Chill."[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/10/narcissism_up_in_college_stude_1.html
0 Comments:
No comments have been posted yet!
|
