Psychologists Reveal Why It's Harmful to Keep Calling Millennials "Entitled"
"Young people seem to believe stereotypes about their generation."
Anyone who’s read or watched the news in the past five years has seen some version of the same message: Millennials are ruining everything, including Buffalo Wild Wings, diamonds, and even nightlife. Whether or not any of this bad rap is deserved, new research on 2,553 people in the journal PLOS One shows that millennials believe what they’re told about themselves — and that doing so is harming them.
In a paper published on Wednesday, a team of researchers presents evidence that millennials believe they’re the most entitled and narcissistic living age group, and this belief is distressing to them.
The study’s first author, Josh Grubbs, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University, tells Inverse that this research was motivated, among other reasons, by the fact that even though scientists haven’t demonstrated that millennials are any worse than previous generations, millennials have nonetheless been found guilty of entitlement and narcissism by their elders.
“Primarily, I am a millennial, and I’ve always been perturbed by the characterization of my generation as narcissistic and entitled,” he says.
Whether or not millennials are actually more entitled and narcissistic, their elders think they are.
“Secondarily, even in the field of psychology, this conclusion (that millennials or Gen Z) are the most narcissistic and entitled generations is highly controversial, yet, in the court of public opinion, it seems that the verdict is in.”
“I was curious about how young people felt about this characterization,” he adds. “Given that I myself was perturbed by it, I wondered if the whole generation was.”
Despite a lack of evidence, many people seem eager to label millennials as entitled narcissists.
Across three different experiments in five sample populations, Grubbs and his team found a consistent pattern: Millennials not only think they’re uniquely narcissistic and entitled, but they also think those qualities are negative in themselves and others, and they feel bad about being seen this way.
While Grubbs notes that this finding wasn’t surprising, he points out that the cross-generational attitudes reveal a gulf of understanding between millennials and their elders.
“That is, older generations think younger generations are much more narcissistic than themselves, but younger generations think that their own generation is only slightly more narcissistic than older generations,” he says. “Collectively, this points to two things: young people seem to believe stereotypes about their generation (even when the science isn’t settled) and older people seem to be particularly prone to the ‘kids these days’ sorts of arguments.”
Grubbs is careful to note that this study didn’t quantify the harm being done to young people when their elders call them entitled and narcissistic.
“Young people do not like being called narcissistic and do not seem to like their generation being called narcissistic, but we did not test whether this affects mental health,” he says.
Millennials seem to be absorbing the negative ideas about themselves that they keep hearing.
“Having said that, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s not having a positive effect. I also don’t know that it is any worse with this generation than with previous ones in quality. That is, I think older generations have always held roughly negative views of younger generations.”
Other researchers have found some evidence of harm to this generation, though.
A January 2019 meta-analysis published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review showed that millennials struggle with perfectionism more than previous generations — and the effects on mental health get worse as they get older.
Grubbs notes that the internet may have played a role in changing the equation for millennials.
Almost every single generation thinks the one after it is ruining the world in some special way. For instance, Conrad Gessner warned in the 1500s that the printing press would unleash an unmanageable torrent of information, and before that, Socrates warned that the written word would destroy people’s memory. But neither of them had blogs, so the spread of their ideas was relatively limited.
“However, the past two generations (millennials and Gen Z) have grown up with constant exposure to these messages via the internet,” says Grubbs.
And while the written word, the printing press, and Snapchat have admittedly changed some of the ways people think and act, millennials and Gen Z are some of the first to grow up with a barrage of blogs talking about all their shortcomings.
“Now, older generations mocking younger ones do it on the internet and in blogs and on cable news, in a way that constantly exposes younger folks to the negative messages,” says Grubbs.
So while the jury is still out on whether millennials are actually worse than everyone else, it seems that societal attitudes are having some effects on them.
Grubbs says that for his next steps, he’d like to test the other side of the coin.
“I’m really interested in how these generational labels extend in the other direction,” he says. “For example, what do millennials really think about Boomers? That’s where I’d like to go next.”
Abstract: Both academic and popular literatures have repeatedly contended that emerging adults are the most narcissistic and entitled age-group in modern times. Although this contention is fiercely debated, the message that emerging adults are narcissistic and entitled has saturated popular culture. Despite this saturation, relatively little empirical work has examined how emerging adults might react to such labels. Across three studies in five samples in the U.S., the present work sought to address this deficit in research. Results from cross-sectional samples of university students at two universities, as well as an online convenience sample of web-using adults (Study 1), indicated that emerging adults believe their age- group and the one following them (e.g., adolescents) to be the most narcissistic and entitled age-groups, that they have generally negative opinions of narcissism and entitlement, and that they respond negatively to being labeled as narcissistic and entitled. Additionally, results from adult web-users revealed that, while all age groups tend to view adolescents and emerging adults as more narcissistic and entitled than older age-groups, these opinions are more exaggerated among members of older age-groups. Finally, across two experimental studies (Studies 2 & 3), results indicated that emerging adults react negatively to labeling of their age-group as narcissistic and entitled, but no more negatively than they do to potentially related undesirable labels (e.g., oversensitive). Collectively, these results indicate that emerging adults are aware of and somewhat distressed by messaging that casts their age-group as the most narcissistic and entitled age-group ever.
