Commentators raising the alarm point to the many parents spoiling their offspring, dressing their children in shirts that say 'Princess', 'Champion' or something similar – and encouraging them to be overly confident. They highlight the countless vain posts on Instagram and other platforms where young people often appear self-centred.
But is there really any truth to the idea that narcissism is on the rise or is it just a popular myth?
The idea that narcissism is on the rise was lent scholarly credence in 2008 by an influential study that reported grandiose narcissism had risen significantly among college students in the United States from 1982 to 2006. Grandiose narcissism is the brash, attention-seeking form of the trait that's distinct from so-called vulnerable narcissism, which is associated with being thin-skinned and insecure.
These researchers assembled studies that used the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) to measure grandiose narcissism.
Based on the 2008 findings, some psychologists went so far as to declare a narcissism epidemic. The media impact of this research was enormous, spawning several popular science books that lamented the ever-increasing challenges of dealing with entitled youths.
In this vein, narcissism was described as a new plague ravishing the youth of America and beyond, with ensuing serious repercussions that might even have been responsible for the economic downturn of the emerging millennium.
However, in the world of academic psychology, the 2008 findings did not receive universal acclaim. In fact, at least four articles published between 2008 and 2013 from three independent research teams, led by Jeffrey Arnett, Brent Roberts and Kali Trzesniewski, failed to replicate generational increases in narcissism. Yet these papers attracted little media attention ('The Youth Are OK' doesn't make such a great newspaper story) and the advocates of the epidemic cited various methodological issues with the replication attempts, such as that they focused on students from different university campuses at different times.
With the idea of the youth narcissism epidemic continuing to dominate public perception, and the scholarly debates unresolved, we (together with our colleague Paul Stickel) recently attempted to replicate the original study using the very same methodological approach, but based on a substantially larger database and time frame.
We systematically assembled the entire available literature on this topic, screening almost 8,000 primary studies from several scientific literature databases and assessing the full texts of more than 4,000 of them. We ended up with the data of more than 540,000 participants, with an average age of 27 years and from 55 countries all over the world, who were administered the NPI for grandiose narcissism between 1982 and 2023.
Based on this vast data set, we found no evidence for any increasing trends in grandiose narcissism across time. Not in the US, not in college students, let alone on a global scale. In fact, the only discernible time trend in narcissism scores across all investigated countries and populations was a negative one – meaning that narcissism scores have actually been decreasing.
You might be wondering how we can possibly explain these decreases in narcissism, especially in light of the many supposedly narcissism-boosting aspects of modern life such as social media. But actually, empirical data gives little reason to assume that social media boosts our narcissism. On the contrary, the omnipresent necessity for a social media user to compare their imperfect self with people boasting seemingly flawless lives, appearances and experiences can have a negative effect on self-confidence and wellbeing, especially in young people. This means that social media is more likely lowering instead of increasing grandiose narcissism.
What's more, far from displaying greater entitlement, it appears prosocial behaviour has been on the rise among young people over the past decades. For instance, large-scale national surveys of incoming college students in the US found that recent participation in volunteer work increased from 66 per cent in 1990 to 84 per cent in 2008, alongside an increased desire to help others and participate in community action. Young people are also more tolerant of diversity. Consistent with these observations, antisocial behaviours have dropped in many countries.
In summary, there is no indication that young people nowadays are any more narcissistic than young people some decades ago. In fact, the concerns about an increasingly egotistical, self-absorbed and arrogant youth that will continue to endanger the economy appear to be unfounded and overly pessimistic. On the contrary, we have good reason to assume that young people nowadays are more ready to help, more tolerant and more prosocial in general, thus promising a positive outlook for the future.