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Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking, Protzko and Schooler, 2019

Paper, Tags: #social-sciences

Humanity has a perennial tendency to denigrate kids, there's a tendency to notice the limitations of others where one excels and a memory bias projecting one's current qualities onto the youth of the past. We compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears.

Five studies were designed to examine the occurrence of and mechanisms underpinning people denigrating the youth of the present. Studies 1-3 examine the prevalence of the 'kids these days' effect across 3 different traits and the degree to which it's pronounced for people who excel on that trait.

  • Study 1: examines whether the belief that children are less respectful of their elders is magnified for people who are high in authoritarianism
    • The more authoritarian someone is, the more they believe that children today no longer respect their elders.
  • Study 2: whether people who are more intelligent are particularly predisposed to believe that children are becoming less intelligent
    • More intelligent people believe that children today are becoming less intelligent.
  • Study 3: whether well­read people are especially likely to think that today’s children no longer like to read
    • the more well­read people were, the more they believed that children today no longer like to read
  • Study 4: investigated the mechanisms leading people to perceive kids these days as particularly lacking on those traits on which they themselves excel in a mediation mode
  • Study 5: manipulated people’s beliefs in their standing in one of these domains and showed resulting indirect decreases in the kids these days effect through our proposed mechanisms

In five studies, we found evidence of a general tendency to disparage the present youth across traits (respect for elders and enjoying reading) and a trait­specific tendency to see today’s youth as especially lacking on those traits on which one particularly excels (respect for elders, intelligence, and enjoying reading)

The present findings suggest that denigrating today’s youth is a fundamental illusion grounded in several distinct cognitive mechanisms, including a specific bias to see others as lacking in those domains on which one excels and a memory bias projecting one’s current traits to past generations