Most of the stereotypes tied to so-called generations are ugly and insulting – whether it’s the greed and materialism associated with “boomers,” the narcissism and entitlement associated with “millennials,” or the aimlessness associated with “Gen X.”
Such unpleasantness is not only mean-spirited but also scientifically wrongheaded. The closer researchers look, the more arbitrary they find the boundaries between so-called generations. There’s no evidence that any sorts of personality traits or character flaws go along with so-called boomers, Gen Xers, millennials or Gen Zers.
People love generation labels in the way they love astrological sign categories. Some people get deep meaning out of astrology despite a total lack of evidence. Both kinds of labels are social constructs – they affect us only because so many people believe in them.
“When you dig into research into differences in discrete generations, there’s no evidence they exist,” said Cort Rudolph, a psychologist at Saint Louis University who has studied age and work-related behavior. “All this generation stuff is total nonsense.”
There are two real things that are going on, however. One is that as people age, they go through different stages in life – not quite in lock step, since people reach various maturity levels and adulthood milestones at different times [or not at all]. But there’s a progression.
And there are events [wars, recessions] and new technologies that may affect those in college or seeking their first jobs differently from those who are older and more established.
They affect us only because so many people believe in them.
But those things don’t create generational boundaries. Different studies use different boundaries between the major generations, says Rudolph, making the whole notion of generations into a moving target and therefore not conducive to scientific probing.
A few years ago, the U.S. Army funded research into generations to learn how to persuade young people to stay in the military. George Washington University psychologist David Costanza, who was involved in that effort, says there was a theory floating around that historical events shaped whole cohorts of people, giving them distinct traits.
It’s not that wars, depressions and disease outbreaks such as AIDS don’t shape people – they do. But not, it would seem, in any uniform or predictable way across artificially drawn generational categories. There’s a stereotype that so-called millennials are narcissistic job-hoppers because they have helicopter parents, he says, and that something about the Vietnam War made baby boomers materialistic.
His research suggests that’s all wrong. Millennials are no more narcissistic than anyone else, he says, and not unusually fickle about jobs. A bad economy may force young people to take undesirable first jobs – from which many will hop to something more rewarding when the economy improves. The big misconception, he says, is that merely being in a particular “generation” will endow you with certain traits.
Last month, psychologists at University of California, Santa Barbara published a paper in Science Advances called “Kids These Days: Why Youth of Today Seem Lacking.” They found there’s nothing wrong with kids these days, even though many older people wrongly think younger people have less respect for elders and less love for reading than they had when young.
The authors looked into ways to cure these bad assumptions. What they found was that, in the case of reading, if they wrongly told good readers they scored poorly in a test of literary achievement, then suddenly those people got over themselves and they cut younger people more slack.
Perhaps younger people, too, might not be so quick to judge so-called boomers if they were not so confident in their own technological proficiency and small carbon footprints. The good news is that with the rise of Gen Z, those who make up these trendy labels will very soon run out of letters. If we’re lucky, that will help put an end to them.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
