What if the students deemed as deluded narcissists are being judged by the deluded narcissists of the previous generation which is why it's only reporting it as a 30% increase?
-Paul Keith
Or, being judged by folk who dislike/hate [perceived] narcissists?
I'm always a bit - often a large bit - suspicious of such studies, since I seldom know the true qualifications of those who make/made the study.
-barney
Or something. Seeing that it is from Fox, I understood why the editorial's overall assembly began to gnaw at me. Let's dig around in it a little. In many ways this is in my opinion a bad use of science to further an agenda.
1. "Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist." per the byline. But the author of *both papers* (there's two of them going on here, did y'all miss it?) is *"only"* a psychologist, and let's make sure we don't mention her academic title! Nothing like a little degree bashing before the article even gets going! Yes, it does appear she has a doctorate as well. Meanwhile, let's comment on papers without even giving the source citations! After all, if you make readers do unnecessary hard work to find them, it becomes much more fun to sit back and soak in the nice doctor's editorial.
2. Here's a related paper, though it looks like not a match for either of the two:
http://www.apa.org/p...s/psp-102-5-1045.pdfBut it does give us clues about what the other papers might be: In abbreviated-citation form, we get:
"Many previous studies have examined generational differences in
personality traits and positive self-views (e.g., Andre´ et al., 2010;
Gentile, Twenge, & Campbell, 2010; Stewart & Bernhardt, 2010;
Twenge, Campbell, & Gentile, 2011)."
That leads me to the citations section of the paper.
Twenge, J. M., Campbell, W. K., & Gentile, B. (2011). Generational
increases in agentic self-evaluations among American college students,
1966–2009. Self and Identity. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/
15298868.2011.576820
3. Got it. Here's part of the abstract, which sounds pretty sure like it's a match:
Compared to previous generations, more American college students now rate themselves as above average on attributes such as academic ability, drive to achieve, leadership ability, public speaking ability, self-confidence, and writing ability (based on a nationally representative sample collected 1966–2009; N = 6.5 million). These birth cohort differences are similar with controls for race and gender and occurred despite the college population becoming less selective. Trends in positive self-views are correlated with grade inflation (which increased d = 0.81), but are not explained by changes in objective performance (e.g., SAT scores have declined, d = −0.22) or effort (time spent studying is down, d = − 0.31).
Journal of Self and Identity
Volume 11, Issue 4, 2012
It seems to be behind a paywall, but many people can go to a library if they really cared. But wouldn't it have been nice if for once reporters could bother to say where mysterious "studies" are?
Meanwhile, I'm out of energy to track down the second article based on a 1 sentence conclusion. Overall, Ms. Twenge has been studying this stuff for a long time.
