It is Developmental Me, Not Generation Me: Developmental Changes are more Important than Generational Changes in Narcissism—Commentary on Trzesniewski & Donnellan (2010)

Abstract

In this article, we make two points about the ongoing debate concerning the purported increase in narcissistic tendencies in college students over the last 30 years. First, we show that when new data on narcissism are folded into preexisting meta-analytic data, there is no increase in narcissism in college students over the last few decades. Second, we show, in contrast, that age changes in narcissism are both replicable and comparatively large in comparison to generational changes in narcissism. This leads to the conclusion that every generation is Generation Me, as every generation of younger people are more narcissistic than their elders.