SIO302: Are Boomers Narcissistic? Are Millennials Entitled? What a Large Narcissism Study Does and Doesn't Tell Us

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, episode 302. I'm Thomas and that is Dr. Lindsey Osterman. How you doing, Lindsey?

0:00:18 Lindsey: Fantastic. How are you?

0:00:20 Thomas: I'm doing great. I co-host Lindsay, we were going to talk about whether or not baby boomers are more narcissistic than any other generation. And, uh, I, so this was something that I came across that I sent to you and and it's cool because when you have a co-host like Lindsay who is, you know, uh, scientifically literate, it's always like, oh, I see this, you know, popular coverage of a thing and clearly there's a study behind it, like it's pretty obvious just looking at the headline, like, oh, there's going to be a study and will science co-hosperson Lindsey say this is like, okay, they blew it, or will that will she say like, yeah, great study, cool story, you know, like, this will be interesting.

And so that's kind of what this is, because this made the rounds, it turns out this is a little older than I thought, but I think it made one of those things where, you know, things pop up again and go a little viral, even when they're, they're older. This originally is from December 2019, but I, I came across it the other month on Reddit, I think, and it was just interesting because it confirmed you all my biases, but that's why we

0:01:19 Thomas: Have you yeah No, I wanted to make sure that like, okay, is this, this seems really true, but is this true? So we're going to break that all down. I'm excited to find out how true or not true this is.

0:01:19 Lindsey: Is, this is a perennial topic.

0:01:31 Lindsey: Yeah. So the, the headline of the original article, which was published in Insider, um, was baby boomers are more narcissistic than millennials, according to the largest ever study on narcissism. And like you, I saw this and I was like, yeah, that tracks.

0:01:47 Thomas: Oh, so you didn't even read it. No, I'm just kidding.

0:01:48 Lindsey: No, no, I didn't.

0:01:50 Thomas: You just came on here to say that also the title seems right to you and that's it. Okay. End of show.

0:01:55 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. No, so I read the original research article that they were talking about. And unfortunately, this headline and it's reiterated in the article itself gets a lot of things wrong about the actual research article. But it is an interesting research article, there's some flaws, but they also did some really interesting stuff.

0:02:14 Lindsey: I the original research article is by William Chopik and Kevin Grimm. They published this in 2019, and it's called "Longitudinal Changes and Cohort Differences in Narcissism from Early to Older Adulthood." So that's a mouthful. And what this research article is trying to do is push back against this perennial idea that kids these days are more self-centered and more entitled and brattier than the generation that came before them.

0:02:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, because already from what you said, it sounds, stop me if I'm wrong, sounds sounds more like a study of how people change rather than like a comparison between generations or is it both?

0:02:54 Lindsey: It's both, yeah. Yeah, they do both things. They look at changes in narcissism across the lifespan, and they do this for people that were born in multiple different cohorts, which is is pretty cool. It's a lot of things to do in one study, and you don't see it that often, um, but yeah, so they're they're pushing back on this kids these days idea, and I really enjoyed the sort of understated opening to their introduction. So they start with this sentence: "People of a certain age have always seemed to remark on the self-centeredness of youth today," which Yeah, youths, um, which also tracks with me.

0:02:55 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Cool. Yeah.

0:03:24 Thomas: Youths. Yep.

0:03:27 Lindsey: I mean, I think that that idea has been around, like, at least in Socrates.

0:03:31 Thomas: Oh yeah. No, they're literally, I was going to say there literally is that Socrates quote, right? I mean, kids these days, they don't even know how to fix their own chariots. You know, can't even drive a manual chariot. You have to only the automatic. Oh, sorry, they can't drive a standard chariot, they only drive the automatic chariot, fancy new one. It's kids' yeah

0:03:31 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I actually have it, yeah. And the transmissions on those newer chariots go out all the time. It's really bad.

0:03:54 Thomas: Yeah making them weak, they only kill three or four men in battle at a time, instead of I used to kill 10, but also is it also true though, like, it's it's not entire like, the fact that every single generation ever has thought that, like, it could also be true that thing, people just get kind of kids these days, and things improve, you know, because of, I don't know, technological improvement, so on and so forth. You know, maybe things do change and, like, later generations just tend to have it easier.

0:03:56 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, it's it's great, I- I mean, we've touched I feel like we've touched on this idea before, that, like, technological advances don't actually make our lives that much easier, though. Like, it just means that thing I mean, things change significantly, like the way that we work and the way we spend our time changes, but things just just remain hard. It feels like we're on this constant treadmill of

0:04:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. We just move on to some other, yeah, some other thing in our hamster wheel of things that we all feel like we have to do for some reason.

0:04:45 Lindsey: Yeah yeah Yeah. Yeah, but but, uh, but you're also right. So this this could be a true thing, and, like, aside from crotchety old men, there actually are, like, a few decades of research that have been examining whether there really are quantitative shifts over time and things like narcissism and positive self views among the kids these days. And so uh Jean Twangy is a social psychologist, and she's one of of the most prominent researchers that's been examining this question. And so a lot of her work focuses on, you know, documenting rises, purported rises, in narcissism among young people over time, over generations. So she actually, so she published a popular press book called "Generation Me" in 2006. And in that book, she was talking about the narcissism epidemic among among primarily millennials. So that's you and me, Thomas.

0:04:51 Thomas: Oh. Yeah.

0:05:39 Lindsey: We're part of an epidemic. So she says that, actually, she extends it a little bit further back than millennials. She says that since like the 1970s or so, that you've been seeing increases in narcissism among primarily young adults. So like college-aged people. And she attributes this to parenting parenting practices, largely. So she thinks that because the parents, yes, yeah, This is exactly that. So millennials, and maybe people that are slightly older than millennials, that'd be, you know, the later part of the Gen Xers, I guess. Our parents coddled us, and they protected us too much. And the school systems were obsessed with raising our self esteem. And so it made our generation more self absorbed and individualistic and narcissistic. So that's her. That's her

0:05:42 Thomas: Okay.

0:06:03 Thomas: Is this the typical participation trophy thesis, okay? Sure.

0:06:29 Thomas: Tour.

0:06:29 Lindsey: Her hypothesis, and she's purported to to marshal quite a bit of evidence, uh, for that for that hypothesis. Um, so I mean, this could be true, like, I I used to be in the narcissism literature a little bit more than I am now, but this was never, um, an area that I paid too much attention to, like, I read her book when she published it, and I remember liking it. Um, but apparently, and this was one of the things that the the current article that we're going to talk about, uh, focused on a lot, is the fact that this literature has a couple of holes in it that are fairly important. And there has been, I think, more recently, some pushback to some of this evidence that has been accumulated about whether it's really showing what it purports to show. So yeah.

0:07:10 Thomas: I'm going to take away her participation trophy for participating and doing a study. I don't know. Recinded. Trophy rescinded, Gene.

0:07:16 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, yep, Yeah, so the authors of the current study describe three primary holes in the existing work on both sort of general studies to look at generational differences on narcissism, as well as like age-related effects, so like lifespan effects on narcissism. And they think that this warrants a re-inspection of how researchers like Twenge have interpreted these data. So the first thing that they talk about in this study is that most of the studies on these questions of narcissism as a function of both age and cohort effects use an overall measure of narcissistic narcissism. And this this could paint an incomplete picture of what's going on because narcissism isn't really a singular thing. It's a it's a pretty multifaceted construct.

0:07:51 Thomas: Oh, yeah.

0:08:02 Lindsey: So, yes, no, that's that's wonderful. So narcissism, and I'm going to caveat up front that there is, you know, some pretty vigorous debate among actual narcissism researchers about how, you know, specifically to define narcissism and how to conceptualize it. But I'm gonna give it a definition that I think is defensible. So narcissism is characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, so like a grandiose sense of self, as well as a pronounced sense of entitlement.

0:08:01 Thomas: I haven't even done the basic podcast host thing of we better define what narcissism even is.

0:08:37 Thomas: Hmm.

0:08:37 Lindsey: So believing that you deserve more than other people do.

0:08:40 Thomas: So like thinking because you bought a house for $14 in the 70s that now you earned it actually and people these days don't, you know, just needed to do what you did.

0:08:49 Lindsey: Just Looking For Handouts. Yeah.

0:08:50 Thomas: Just for example. I don't know. I'm just thinking of like a hypothetical.

0:08:50 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, if they were as hard working as you were, then they could, you know, pay their way through college and, you know, buy a house in cash when they're 25 and all that good stuff. And so these millennials just really need to stop being so lazy is the actual problem, so to give you a picture of like how these, these facets of narcissism are measured, so the grandiosity piece. There's one scale that I really like to use when I'm measuring this. I actually administer this to my statistics students, every semester.

0:08:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yep. It's just like, how fucking cool do you think you are?

0:09:22 Lindsey: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So the narcissistic grandiosity scale is basically just a list of attributes. And then you rate on a scale of like one to seven, how much each word describes you. And so this scale contains words like glorious, perfect, unrivaled.

0:09:33 Thomas: Great. Oh, okay. Zero, zero. I was worried. I actually was worried I was going to fail this because, you know, I feel like I'm self-absorbed, but I don't think I have any of those things about myself. Okay, maybe I have, like, half of the components or something.

0:09:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Are you unrivaled?

0:09:50 Thomas: Unrivaled, but that's such a broad thing. I mean, are we talking about my, you know, my poker game, or, you know, like

0:09:52 Lindsey: Yeah. Just in general. Are you as, as a person?

0:10:00 Thomas: I think I objectively have plenty of rivals, so no.

0:10:07 Lindsey: Okay. What about, what about extraordinary?

0:10:10 Thomas: Extraordinary, I mean, I'm a podcaster for a living, I feel like you know it might be a little little extraordinary, but on the other hand there's plenty of things about me that are not at all extraordinary, extremely ordinary. How do you answer such a broad question? I would just what's what to get on the test. If you just argue with a person the whole time, what do you mean, I, what, you know, like, and then would I fail or pass?

0:10:14 Lindsey: Yeah, that was beyond the, yeah. Okay, yeah, with a, with a Likert scale, yeah? Your data would probably be excluded from the study. That would be my guess.

0:10:35 Thomas: He got, got really well, it would be very boomer, like, like, "I demand to speak to the manager of this test."

0:10:43 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Here's, here's one of my favorite items on the the scale. Omnipotent.

0:10:43 Thomas: Oh, my, okay, no, zero, there should be nobody answers a seven to that, or whatever the scale was like, "Omnipotent."

0:10:58 Lindsey: You would think, and when I administer this in my classes, I always look at that one just to see if anybody gave it a seven. Usually I get like one a year. It says, yeah.

0:11:01 Thomas: Wow, do they know what it means, like, it could, it just be one of those where they don't remember, maybe they think it's benevolent, like, they mix up those two God things, like

0:11:17 Lindsey: No, so that's great because I think that there is a vocabulary issue with that one. So when I administer it, I actually put in parentheses what the definition is.

0:11:28 Thomas: You're like making very sure. I'm literally asking you, do you think you know everything that there is, like, in the universe? They're like, "Yep," no, I, or am I already oh, all-powerful, see, I already don't know, there's definitely of all power, that's even worse, I thought it was going to be like people just thought they knew everything. Omniscient is the one I'm thinking of, see, there you go, I'm an idiot, I'm not very extraordinary, omnipotent, they think they're all that's. Look, I feel like I was trying to give people more benefit of the doubt. Like Like, it's slightly more plausible to be like, "Yeah, I'm a know-it-all. I know everything." Like, maybe that's how you get there or something. But, like, omnipotent? What?

0:11:36 Lindsey: Oh, so omnipotence is actually all-powerful. Yeah. See, there you go. Yeah, yeah. But so I know, so sometimes I think that they're just messing with me.

0:12:11 Thomas: Probably.

0:12:11 Lindsey: It's impossible to tell. But no, I mean, some people, because this scale predicts things, right? People who score really highly on the scale. And by the way, most of the students that fill it out of my class do not score really high on the score. Highly Like it's a very skewed measure. Most people have an average around like a two or something. But yeah, so some people really do rate themselves as like six and sevens on this scale, and they mean it. And so I don't know what's going through their heads when they say that they are, that the word omnipotent completely describes them. But some people seem to believe that probably because they're narcissists, right? Yeah.

0:12:13 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. Cool. They're just really good at arm wrestling or something? I don't really know. Why be all powerful? Okay. Well, I've been humbled by this test already. I don'T know what anything means. Blanked on like one of the terms that was always used in like God debate stuff that I just totally switched.

0:12:47 Lindsey: I don'T know. Yeah. Yeah, um, Indeed. Yeah. So Yeah. They

0:13:01 Thomas: Anyway, it's all right.

0:13:02 Lindsey: Sound pretty similar. Omniscient, Omnipotent. Um, yeah, so there's a lot of words like this, and you're getting, you know, glorious, perfect, unrivaled, omnipresent, right? They're very godlike qualities, so somebody who sincerely rates themselves as like sixes and sevens on the scale really does have, you can, you can say with a lot confidence that they have an inflated A grandiose self-view.

0:13:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, not to continue to ruin your life in this recording, but what if you, you know, what if he accidentally have like Poseidon in your class or something, you know? And he's just like, well, yeah, I am this. Like I am, I'm actually all these things. I, you know, I don't want to be an asshole here, but like, I am these things where you put me in a bind, you know?

0:13:31 Lindsey: Is, well, I mean, well I mean you know just because you're a narcissist doesn't mean that you're not right.

0:13:44 Thomas: Okay. So we'll hold out that possibility for some people who are like, maybe like a Lex Luthor type of person, like a God among men.

0:13:48 Lindsey: Mm-hmm, Exactly, right? But you know, there have been, there have been studies where they look at narcissism and then correlate that with sort of more objective self qualities, and it turns out that their ratings of themselves don't seem to track reality very well. So there's that. But yeah, so this, this grandiosity scale, it has words like the ones we just talked about, God-like qualities, but it also contains words like authoritative, dominant, and high status, right? And so somebody who is a narcissist would also highly endorse those things. So these kind of like more agentic qualities, status-seeking qualities, those kinds of things, that actually does centrally characterize narcissism. But of course, like people who aren't narcissists might also endorse those thing, and that's not necessarily like diagnostic that they're grandiose. And so it's really sort of like the aggregate score on the scale that really tells you whether somebody has a grandiose sense of self. And we're gonna come back to that high status piece in a second. So I thought that was that was worth pointing out.

0:14:38 Thomas: Yeah. Uh-huh. I Mean, not to take the cheap, obvious, cheap, you know? Political shot, but clearly Trump would score sevens on every single thing Of All of this, like, okay, that's the mental model, you and proudly so. Be like, yeah, I'm all powerful, duh.

0:14:56 Lindsey: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, so I'm really glad you brought that up. Because that that also is a feature of narcissism. There's actually there's a cute, single item scale of narcissismo. And the one item on the the scale is, I am a narcissist. And then people rate how true that is. And that actually correlates with these other measures. So narcissist, yeah.

0:15:21 Thomas: To do Another Trump tie, and he just tweeted it out, all this research, it's like it must have been funny for you researcher people to be like, hey, I know you're doing all this really hard work, but we can actually just be like, are you a narcissist? Just, fix that, study done. Like, we don't even need to ask all those other questions.

0:15:37 Lindsey: Yeah, pretty much, right? I mean, it's also nice to get the sort of granular view for reasons that we're going to talk about.

0:15:42 Thomas: Yeah. No, I'm Just teasing.

0:15:43 Lindsey: But I think it does say something important about narcissism, which is that like, people who are really, really high on these traits, and like, you know, would be diagnosable with like narcissistic personality disorder. Like, they're not ashamed of it. They, you know, they embrace this. And I think that that's, I don't know, it's interesting.

0:15:56 Thomas: It's Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Like maybe the very superiority that you would feel would make it so that you're just like, yeah, what do I give a shit if you think I'm a narcissist? Yeah. You know, like must be something like that. OK.

0:16:10 Lindsey: Totally. Yeah, that's grandiosity. That's one facet in narcissism. Another one, and this one really seems to predict a lot more of sort of the negative consequences of narcissism, and that's entitlement. And so So here are a couple of my favorite items from the psychological entitlement scale, which is sometimes used to measure this. So the first item on the scale is, I honestly feel I'm just more deserving than others.

0:16:36 Thomas: Oh, geez. Who would answer hi to that? Wow. Boomers.

0:16:37 Lindsey: Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, a narcissist would. Here's another one. This really is my favorite one on the skill. If I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat.

0:16:49 Thomas: Oh my god, that's awesome, that is awesome. I don't know who would say that, that's incredible.

0:16:52 Lindsey: I know. Yeah. You do know.

0:16:57 Thomas: At the very least be like, you know, the third life, you know, but I guess that's narcissists, don't think they're like, yeah, of course I'm Trump, I should be, I'm the treasure of the planet Earth, like, why would you not put me on the first lifeboat, what if you're the best lifeboat driver. And you're like, well, shoot. Yeah, no, I do need to be on that life. No, I'm just kidding.

0:16:57 Lindsey: You do now.

0:17:08 Lindsey: Exactly. I am. I am the most important. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, because you're the best lifeboat driver. They should add that as one of the scales on the grandiosity thing.

0:17:20 Thomas: Yeah. Just in case.

0:17:24 Lindsey: Yeah, right. So grandiosity and entitlement, that's one model that's been applied to sort of think about narcissism. There are some other factors that go into it in various measures, but I think that these two are pretty uncontroversially central to this construct. And so a few things that narcissism predicts, right, people who are at high on grandiosity and entitlement, they tend to be extraordinarily reactive if they perceive that they have been insulted or slighted in some way. So they can get very aggressive in reaction to those kinds of things because they're awesome, right? And how dare you slight them? Them. They also, narcissism also tends to be associated with things like greater individualism and they have like very pronounced status seeking motivations. They're also more assertive and more confident because again, they're awesome. So why wouldn't they be? And those, those kinds of traits actually tend to serve them pretty well, right? Especially in a, in a capitalist society like ours, right. If you're super confident, exactly.

0:17:57 Thomas: Yeah yeah yeah straight to the top of the corporate ladder.

0:18:24 Lindsey: Right. And that's, that's another thing about about narcissists too, is that they actually tend to like hierarchy because they think that they're going to be the people that rise to the top and some of that can be sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? If you're super confident, that's half the battle. Sure.

0:18:31 Thomas: Yeah, you know, I do tend to like hierarchy in some things, like in sports or competition, because it is nice. Like, not that I think I'm going to be at the top, but it's nice to know where you are. Like, oh, I'm at this rung of the chess competition ladder or some crap. You know, like, I don't know. Maybe it's not all bad.

0:18:52 Lindsey: Yeah. No, I mean, I think about that a little bit differently than I think about, like, uh, hierarchies in terms of, like, power structures. I guess, and You know, so I don't think that narcissists would see anything wrong with, like, you know, the fact that certain social groups have have power dominance over other ones.

0:19:00 Thomas: Ah, yeah, true. Gotcha.

0:19:10 Lindsey: Things, things like that. They're just a little bit different, yeah. Yeah, so another thing that tends to be correlated with narcissism or consequence of narcissism is that they have difficulty maintaining close interpersonal relationships. They tend to be like very initially charming, but because they're not great at prioritizing anyone else's needs over their own, and they tend to treat their relationships in very instrumental ways, you know, what is this person doing for me, uh, that tends to be very corrosive to relationships, and so they have trouble sort of maintaining those over longer periods of time, so, so that's, that's narcissism, that's some of things that associated with it.

0:19:44 Thomas: I guess one thing Maybe that might be important, I'm thinking of now, when we're doing these, I mean, maybe you'd get to this, but like doing these population level cohort thingies, it's not as though like, obviously, boomers aren't all sevens on narcissism, it's like there's going to be little variations in that that'll just kind of over on averages mean that there's a little bit more narcissism in these different groups or a little less, that's like I guess right away, because I'm always like, you know, maybe it's because I hate boomers, and I'm sorry, I'm just like thinking like, yeah, those boomer narcissists, but it's probably going to be like, you now, they're a 2.3 instead instead of a 2.1 kind of thing.

0:19:44 Lindsey: Right. Yes. Yeah.

0:20:21 Lindsey: No. No, I'm really glad you said that, because that's, a that's an important distinction, because, like, the, you know, the profile that I'm painting here really characterizes somebody with like a, a personality disorder. So that is somebody who is maxing out these scales. Differences that have been documented in like the social psychology literature are really more in sort of like looking at narcissism as like a normal personality trait. So like when I said that grandiosity, you know, when I measured in classes, there might be one or two people that get close to maxing out the scale, but most students are going to be in that two to three range.

And so what Twenge has documented in populations is exactly as you just said, it's like, you know, moving like populations moving from like a three to like a 3.5 or something like that. So it's not like, yeah, it's not like the population is necessarily made up of more narcissists or something. So the point in going through this definition stuff, right, there, there are some facets of narcissism that are harmful and problematic, obviously, right. But there are other facets that would be captured by an overall narcissism measure, but that aren't necessarily reflective of pathology or even dysfunction. So that would be things like assertiveness and ambition and even individualism.

And so these authors are suggesting that it's important to look at how these different facets of narcissism might change as a function of both age and generational effects. And typically in this literature that hasn't been done, they're looking at like one summary score and not breaking out these different facets. So that's hole they're going to try to fill. Another hole in this literature that they point out is that most studies on age and generation effects on narcissism,

0:20:22 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Okay.

0:21:57 Lindsey: Most of these studies are cross-sectional, meaning that they measure different groups of people who are either different ages or born at different times and then compare across those different groups. So like if you and I wanted to do a cross-sectional study on narcissism and age right now, we, we would recruit a sample of people who are all different ages and then compare their narcissism scores, right? And if we wanted to do a cross-sectional study on narcissism and generational differences, we could, like, for the next 20 years, take samples of say 20-year-olds every year, and then look at whether the narcissism scores of that, of, you know, groups of 20-years-olds in 2021 are different from groups of 20-year-olds in subsequent years? So there are better and worse ways to handle cross-sectional data, and, you know, cross-sectional studies can tell you super important things, but if you really want to look at how a trait changes over time, as, like, a function of age, then really what you want is longitudinal data, right? Right.

So you want to take one group of people, and you want to measure their narcissism at 20, and then measure it again at 30 and 40 and so on. And so that way you can actually directly observe changes in narcissism as they age. Right. And that can be really helpful because you can compare people to themselves at different points in time, rather than comparing different people of different ages and then assuming that the reason they're different is because of ages.

0:22:31 Thomas: Right. Oh, Right. But then you'd Still kind of need both, right? Because if we tended to have a pattern of less narcissists as we're younger and then get more narcissistic as we're older, and you only have that longitudinal data, you wouldn't necessarily know if this is like normal, that yes, the boomers are more narcissistic, but like we will be more narcissic than whatever the next generation is when we get to that point, right?

0:23:17 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:23:38 Lindsey: Right. So so one way you could do that, though, is not well, you need all of it, but one thing that you could do is kind of combine the longitudinal method with the cross-sectional method in a way, which is exactly what they did. And so what they did was they took multiple groups of people that had been born at different times and then observed changes within those people over time, right?

0:23:40 Thomas: I need all of it Okay.

0:24:01 Lindsey: Right. So you like we if we wanted to do this, we could get a group of 20 year olds today. There are a group OF people that are 20 today, a group people that Are 40 today, group of people that ARE 60 today and so on, and then measure their narcissism and how it changes over the next 30 years.

0:24:14 Thomas: I think if there's one person who lives to be 120, they should get to be a narcissist and they'll be the one data point in your study. Side note, okay, carry on. You'll be like, look at this generation, geez, they think they're God's gift to earth, and you're like, yeah, that's just that one lady who lived really long, and it's actually okay that she's like that, it's fine.

0:24:23 Lindsey: Totally agree. They've earned it. Yeah, she actually is omnipotent. So I support her. Yeah. Yeah. So doing this kind of study, which is called a cohort sequential design can actually be super useful in like teasing apart the effects of age from historical effects, because in cross-sectional designs, they're kind of confounded in a way. Right. But unfortunately, it's a really costly kind of studied to run. It takes forever to execute. And so you tend not to see this kind study as often as you do cross-sectional research, because that's really, quick and cheap. I can easily survey a bunch of people of different ages and see how other different, right?

0:24:34 Thomas: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Right.

0:25:05 Lindsey: So this study addressed this hole in the literature as well. They analyzed longitudinal data from six different samples, each of which contained participants who were born at different times. And it spanned like four generations, I think. So the people in their samples were born as early as 1923 and as late as 1969. And so this allowed the researchers to statistically evaluate both historical differences, so like generational differences, um, as well as developmental differences, so changes across the lifespan at the same time.

0:25:35 Thomas: Notably Pre-millennial, though, right? Okay.

0:25:39 Lindsey: Yeah, right, you noticed that, did you?

0:25:40 Thomas: Well, Pre-gen X even, right? When does Gen X start?

0:25:41 Lindsey: Uh, No. So, uh, 1969 would be like early Gen X. I think that that, that cut off is like mid 60s or something would be the oldest Gen Xers, um, so, so as far as I know, and I think, I think they said this explicitly in the article, they are the first to use this kind of design to look at both lifespan effects and generational effects at the same time, so that's pretty cool. And then the third hole that they're trying to fill, um, they say that, you know, most, most studies on this question of whether young people today are more narcissistic than past generations of young people are focused on college students, so very rarely has narcissism been studied like beyond young adults, and you, not only does using college students restrict your sample in terms of demographic factors, like socioeconomic status.

But it also means that you're limited to knowing about this like one developmental stage of emerging adulthood. And it's entirely possible that there's something that goes on during the college years, you know, that is changing over time and affecting narcissism scores, but that it's not actually reflective of like a generational change. So if you really want to know whether there's a generational difference that kind of persists past this age range, you kind of need to look at a wider range of ages, right? And you need to do that longitudinally, ideally. So, so yeah, so the study examined narcissism scores, like, not only during adolescence in the young adult years, but also through middle age and later adulthood, right?

0:25:47 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, I hope they studied a baby and they're like, this baby is a fucking narcissist piece of shit. And there's seven to everything. It's super important things that has magic powers. This toddler.

0:27:16 Lindsey: Think all babies are narcissists, aren't they?

0:27:17 Thomas: That's what I'm saying. Yeah, they're just just disgusted by these results. Narcissist.

0:27:18 Lindsey: Okay. Yeah, no, that's true. Yeah. I don't think that we lose that for a while, actually. It's probably curvilinear. So in some ways, I think that what they're doing here is really pretty impressive. Now, this isn't originally collected data. So they found six pre-existing longitudinal data sets that all happen to contain this one personality measure that they were able to derive narcissism from. And they use these six data sets to construct essentially a cohort sequential analysis. So they're able to look at narcissism scores measured at multiple ages within these six different age cohorts, right? So they had 747 participants represented in this analysis.

And across all participants and assessment waves, they had 2,282 observations, right, because each person's being observed multiple times, um, side note, uh, the Insider article also said that this was the largest study of narcissism ever conducted. I assumed that meant like it was done on the largest number of people. That's not true. That's, there have been studies with thousands of participants, but I think where they got that from is that this is a, in using that that cohort sequential design, right, um, and studying people from such such a large range of generations and ages and whatever. Okay, so there are representatives in this data set from the Greatest Generation, which are people that were born in the early, the early

0:27:27 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:45 Lindsey: 1900s to late 20s.

0:28:44 Thomas: Already a bad start to your narcissism. Just saying. Okay, carry on. We're known as the greatest generation,

0:28:49 Lindsey: Yeah, they turned out to be the worst ones, by the way. Yeah, their narcissism scores were the worst. Spoilers, but yeah. So they had one of their samples was born around 1923. So that would be right in that greatest generation. They also had representatives from the next generation after the greatest generation, which was the silent generation. So those people born late 20's to mid 40's. I know. Yeah. They don't speak up very Very often. So the silent generation actually was almost half of their sample. So 351 of their participants were from this time period. So they had two samples of people that were born around 1929, and then one sample that was born between 1936 and 1938. So yeah, so that was close to half of the people they had.

0:29:10 Thomas: You never hear from them.

0:29:34 Thomas: Wow. It is interesting about that, that generation, they weren't old enough to like win the war and be the greatest and all that, and then they, but they weren't boomers, and then so what did they do, did they ruin the world, or did they get away with it, maybe they also ruined the world, but they got away with because we don't think they re silent, silent but deadly

0:29:41 Lindsey: Yeah, that's a good question. That's right. They kept their heads Yeah. Oh, so that was them. And then, right, then they have the one, they have one sample that are, like, arguably baby boomers, but they're kind of cusp. So these folks were born around 1943. And most of the cutoffs that I see for the baby boomer generation is, like 1945 to 1965. 65.

0:30:14 Lindsey: So I I'm, I'm going to go ahead and say that they are early boomers because you know, like these, this generational stuff is really about shared experiences around certain times. I think that they fall into that category, but it's just, it's funny that the, the insider headline was about boomers and millennials, and there's no millennials in this study. And arguably there are no boomers. So

0:29:54 Thomas: Huh yeah mhm yeah wow wait

0:30:34 Lindsey: That's funny.

0:30:34 Thomas: So there isn't some other data set that we're, this is it, there's no, okay, that's weird, hmm

0:30:37 Lindsey: Uh-huh. I know it's weird. So those are our boomers, cusp boomers. And then the most recently born generation in the data in this analysis is Gen Xers, right? So these are people born around 1969. And so they'd be, you know, early, early Gen XERS. So we have the largest range of ages observed for the greatest generation and the silent generation, right. So those are our oldest generations in the set. So for both of those samples, or there was actually four samples, but for the samples that included these two generations, we have observations from 13 to 77 for the greatest generation, and we have observations from ages 13 to 69 for the silent generation, right? So we really do have lifespan data for the older people in this sample. Now, for the boomers, we only have data from middle adulthood to later adulthood. Resulted. So we've got observations from ages 43 to 72.

0:31:22 Thomas: Yeah that's weird, right?

0:31:40 Lindsey: Yeah. I mean, again, it's preexisting data and there's, there's a lot of reasons that, you know, maybe they started assessing these people late or maybe they just didn't include this particular measure in the earlier waves of data collection.

0:31:52 Thomas: But you have data from even earlier for an even older generation, which is kind of odd, right? Go okay, yeah

0:31:57 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. I means, but these are all like completely different studies. Yeah Yeah So boomers, we've just got that later period. For the Gen Xers, is we only have early data. So we've got data from them from adolescence to early adulthood, so ages 14 to 23. So it's little lopsided, and that's going to be important for interpreting some of the effects that we talk about. But nonetheless, in aggregate, right, we have comparisons that we can make at certain ages, like across like at least three generations for all of the data in the set essentially, right?

We've got observations from the greatest generation and the silent generations that we can compare to the Gen Xers and the same for boomers. So there's good stuff here. It's limited, but there is good stuff here that can allow us to make some inferences. How do they measure narcissism here? Use something in each of these six studies that they're analyzing data from. They administered something called a Q-sort, which is a personality measure. And there are different versions of the QSort, but you essentially, you give people a stack of cards that have either like personality words or trait words, or like maybe short phrases that describe traits. And you have people sort them in certain ways to like describe their own personality.

0:33:14 Lindsey: The way that the Q-sort was administered in these six studies that they're analyzing essentially amounts to something like a Likert. Scale. Um, if you, if take any personality measure, it might have a statement like, well, you know, like, I am a narcissist. And then you rate how much you agree with that on a scale of one to nine, that one to 9 scale is called a Likert scale. So the way that they structured this Q-sort essentially functions like that. So they, they gave people, um, 100 cards, each with a description on them, and they had them sort them into nine categories according to how characteristic that statement is of them. So category one is extremely uncharacteristic of me, category nine is extremely characteristic of me. So it's, it's a Likert scale essentially, um, okay, so there's 100 cards, and a subset of those cards contained descriptions that map on to facets of narcissism.

0:34:05 Lindsey: So they pulled out three facets, and this was based on prior work that had, you know, assessed narcissism using the Q-sort. And they named their facets some really weird stuff, but you'll see how they map on the definition that we talked about previously. So the first facet is called hypersensitivity. So, the descriptors that fed into this were like being thin-skinned, being sensitive to criticism, or interpersonal slights. Being overly concerned with, like, your own adequacy. And, you know, that is sort of central to narcissism. So that's their first facet. Their second facet, they called willfulness, which I like even less as a label. But this captured traits like being self-indulgent, being condescending toward others, right?

0:34:50 Lindsey: Things that also are characteristic of narcissists. And this actually probably maps on a little bit to both grandiosity and entitlement in some ways, right, like the self-indulgence piece, I think probably maps on more to that idea of being more deserving, um, being condescending toward others probably maps out more to like feeling like you're better than other people, right, and then the last facet they called autonomy, and the, the traits that are the descriptions that fed into this were things like valuing independence, valuing autonomy, having high aspirations for level of self, right, and so, so the things here are really more about like individualism and status striving.

And, you know, like we talked about with the grandiosity scale, those things do characterize people that are narcissists or high in narcissistic traits, but they also characterize people who are not. And they actually found this when they validated these facets before they applied them in the current data set. The autonomy dimension actually does the worst job of capturing narcissism. And so there's some interesting patterns that come out with the first two facets, the hypersensitivity and willfulness, that look completely different with the autonomy dimension, which is kind of cool. Was their measure of narcissism, was how the people in these six different studies rated themselves on the traits that fed into these three different dimensions.

Right. And I should note, this is not a typical measure of narcissism by current research standards. Like in current research, usually people use something called the narcissistic personality inventory, or they use those scales that I talked about earlier that measure grandiosity entitlement. But, you know, this research goes back like decades, and the QSORT has been around for a really long time. And if you want to do research like this that goes back this far, and you wantto have direct comparisons of the same measures across all those studies, you need to use something that's commonly administered like the Qsort. So that's why they took this approach. Approach.

0:35:51 Thomas: Yeah So it's about trying to like fit that into the The current measures of narcissism, like a translation almost.

0:36:57 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. And Right. Of course, you also need to demonstrate that you're actually capturing narcissism, right? And so one thing that they did that I was glad to see that they did.

0:37:05 Thomas: They found Trump in the data. I'm like, see?

0:37:07 Lindsey: Yeah. Exactly. They just had Trump fill out the measures and then, yeah. No, but they actually, they collected an internet sample of 545 people and they had them complete both the Q sort.

0:37:18 Thomas: So they do both of them. Yeah, okay, yeah. And make sure that their translation is working. Interesting. Okay.

0:37:20 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah so they had them do the Q sort, they created the factors that they were going to use on this other data, and then they also had them take the NPI and the NARQ, which is another measure of narcissism, and they just did a validation to make sure that it's capturing what they thought it did. And the first two factors, hypersensitivity and willfulness, really did map on very well to these narcissistic or these more standard narcissism measures. Measures. But again, the autonomy one really didn't.

0:37:49 Lindsey: It like, yeah, yeah. So it either didn't correlate with the different facets that they measured from these standard measures, or it like inconsistently or weakly correlated with it. So, like, it would be like very weakly positively correlated with some facets and actually negatively weakly correlated with others. So it just, it essentially was not measuring narcissism is the point. So the researchers analyzed data from all six of these samples together in the same analysis. And that way they were able to treat both age and cohort as predictors of these narcissism facets simultaneously. And they also included gender as a factor, which is a really good call because there are very well-documented average differences between men and women on narcissistic traits, right? Right? Women are just huge narcissists. It's crazy narcissistic compared to men.

0:37:43 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

0:38:34 Thomas: No.

0:38:34 Lindsey: Just kidding. It's the other way around.

0:38:36 Thomas: I was going to say, you can't pull that one over on me. I think that makes so much sense with our culture. I would go on a rant, but you're just starting a new section, so I don't want to. I'll go on rant later.

0:38:38 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:38:47 Lindsey: We can, we can come back to that. Yeah, So first of all, they found that hypersensitivity, willfulness, and autonomy were all pretty stable over time, about as much as any other personality trait. So like personality does change somewhat over the lifespan, but they're also fairly stable, right? So if you're high on these traits relative to other people as a young adult, you're also likely to be relatively high compared to others in later adulthood too. So there's some degree of stability there. But they also found that there were some changes in narcissism over the lifespan, right. So to start with hypersensitivity and willfulness, again, those were the two that really were associated with narcissism, they found that both hypersensitivity and willfulness declined slightly with age.

0:38:49 Thomas: Okay. Huh.

0:39:36 Lindsey: Yeah. So for hypersENSITIVITY, yeah, I thought so too. For hypersENSIVITY, that decline looked a little bit curved. So it wasn't really a very steep decline from adolescence to about age 40. But after that, you saw a somewhat steeper decline. Willfulness seemed to decline more linearly. So you saw a steady decline from adolescence to early adulthood to middle adulthood to later adulthood, right? Now, it is a pretty small decrease. It's statistically meaningful, but we're talking about average differences of like less than half a scale point across the lifespan. So there's small changes across the across the lifetime. And they also replicated previous research in finding that both men men were higher on both hypersensitivity and willfulness than women were. And yeah, that replicates prior research.

0:39:36 Thomas: That's interesting.

0:40:24 Lindsey: Now, autonomy, right? Again, this was the one that was not strongly associated with narcissism. In contrast to hypers sensitivity and willfulness, they found that autonomy seemed to increase slightly over the lifespan.

0:40:36 Thomas: That makes sense.

0:40:37 Lindsey: Yeah, right. But it was, it was eigentlich the strongest out of the three effects. So yeah, right. So most of the cohorts, like particularly the three that they had observations from the largest ranges of ages, so the two older generations, they just showed like steady increases in autonomy from adolescence to later adulthood. It's a pretty clean looking relationship.

0:40:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:59 Lindsey: Similarly to hypersensitivity and willfulness, men were higher on average on this dimension than women were. But there's a caveat to that that I'll come back to, which is interesting. All right. So that's the lifespan effects. In terms of the generational effects, right? So for this analysis, they compared the different age cohorts in their sample on hypersensitivity, willfulness, and autonomy while controlling for age, which was important, right, given that the ages of the samples are different, right. Right. Yeah. So first of all, they found that hypersensitivity was higher in the three earliest born cohorts. So that was the greatest generation of the silent generations. So people born between 1923 and 1938. So higher among them than among the two later born cohords, which was the boomers and the Gen Xers.

0:41:49 Lindsey: So this does contradict the prediction somewhat that some people have made and that Twangy has echoed with more recent generations, that each generation is getting increasingly more narcissistic than the one that came before it, right?

0:42:01 Thomas: Yeah, but I guess it doesn't tell us for sure if millennials are off the charts.

0:42:08 Lindsey: No, we don't know that one yet. Not from this data, at least. Actually, there's been more recent research that suggests they're not.

0:42:13 Thomas: It's almost like millennials shouldn't have even been in the headline in any way in the coverage of this, right?

0:42:19 Lindsey: It is kind of like that. Yeah. Yeah, right. But at the very least, you know, TwangY and some other people have sort of, you Know, even though they focused on mainly millennials, They've kind of extrapolated and said, you know, it's possible that this isn't, you know, unique to millennials, that this is just a trend over time, that each generation gets more narcissistic. That does not seem to be the case, right? Or at least that's not supported by these data, right. That said, I think that it's worth pointing out that the baby boomer sample was 100% women. Yeah. And in, I

0:42:20 Thomas: Okay. Oh, what the? How is that

0:42:51 Lindsey: Know.

0:42:51 Thomas: Possible?

0:42:51 Lindsey: No. Well, so they drew it.

0:42:52 Thomas: Are they just doing something? Whatever they got it from was like a study of women, for some reason. Okay.

0:42:57 Lindsey: It was drawn from a women's college. Yeah. Right. Almost all of it. So I think that like four out of the six samples came from like preschools and samples of infants. But the Boomer sample and then one of the one Silent Generation samples were drawn from graduates from a woman's college, right? So they were a little bit different. And so those two samples are all women. And in the first analyses, the ones that looked at lifespan effects, they controlled for gender, but from their paper, it is not clear to me that they controlled for gender in the cohort analysis. And maybe they did, but they didn't say that they did. And they acknowledged it in the discussion section as a limitation. So it's possible that there was something about their data structure that made it impossible to control for gender. I don't know.

0:43:41 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:41 Lindsey: But that does complicate the interpretation here, right? Now, the Gen X sample, right, Right. The most recently born sample doesn't have this problem that included half men and women. But I still think that it complicates the interpretation overall that hypersensitivity is declining generationally. Right. That was hypers sensitivity for willfulness. They did not find any meaningful cohort effects. So after controlling for age, there didn't seem to be any consistent trends distinguishing the earlier born cohorts from the later born ones. And finally, they found that later-born cohorts were higher than earlier-born cohorts on the autonomy dimension. And this was probably the most dramatic effect in terms of the cohort effects. So like the first two, the earliest-born two cohorts were like pretty low on the economy dimension.

0:43:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:54 Thomas: If you're comparing, Huh.

0:44:32 Lindsey: And then the last three cohorts that they measured were like, Like, it was a pretty dramatic increase in that 1936-1938 cohort, and it stayed pretty consistently high after that, as do I. And it's kind of hard to tell when you're dealing with data like this, because there's so many things. But, you know, so I think it's worth noting, again, the 1936, 1938 cohort, which is where you see this increase, that's the other sample that contains only women. Yeah. Yeah. And the women in this sample would have been in their early 20s in the early 1960s. And that was a pretty big decade for women's rights.

0:44:44 Thomas: That's Interesting. I wonder why that is. Yeah.

0:45:13 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:13 Lindsey: It was 1960 when the FDA approved the first commercially available birth control pill, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. And so like, I wonder if some of this spike, right, that remains high in the 1943 cohort, which was again, all women, it could have had, it's impossible to tell from this data, right? But like, that was where my mind went, given the composition of the sample.

0:45:34 Thomas: It Sort of makes You Wonder what the heck we can tell from this data. Even though it's, the you know, not the largest narcissism study, but a very interesting large narcissism study. But what those differences, there, the fact that there's only women and a bunch of those, and all that, that you're saying, like, what can we really get from this, Do you think? Yeah.

0:45:52 Lindsey: Well, so I would encourage people to go, because we're to link the article as always, I would courage people to look at the scatter plots at the end of the paper, where they're displaying the age analyses, because they do control for gender in those analyses, and they color code the scatter plot so that you can see which data points are coming from from which cohort. And at least visually, that can give you a sense of like the trends over the lifespan for people of different cohorts. And I think it actually, it gives you a better sense of what's really being shown with this data, right? Even, so I take your point that there are, there are a ton of limitations here. I would want to take the generational effects broadly with a grain of salt. I don't think that you can look at these and say, yes, we have evidence that these traits are declining with each generation. These traits are increasing.

0:46:39 Lindsey: There's, I don't think that these data speak to that, um, but they do, they do kind of give you a sense of whether these specific generations, right, I mean, maybe put the the women's groups aside, um, they can give you a sense whether these these specific generations in the set look different with each other, from each other, over the lifespan. And that is, that is pretty interesting. And the Take-home for me is that at least on the the first two traits that really track with narcissism, they don't look that different, like, Well, No, so the, you get changes over the lifespan, but the changes that you see over the lifetime don't looks substantially different across these different cohorts.

0:47:07 Thomas: So Stuff stays solid Throughout your life.

0:47:18 Thomas: Okay.

0:47:18 Lindsey: Yeah, mean, there's some things that like, I don't know, maybe there's some difference there, but like if look at these, these dots are really all on top of each other, it doesn't look like strong generational influences to me.

0:47:28 Thomas: It, to me, straight Osterman, can we still say that boomers are narcissists? There's A not supported, for real, like, is there, is that part of it? I mean, obviously we can't compare with this data to millennials, I don't know why that was even in the discussion in The article. But I mean, is there any evidence of that claim? Does this ultimately fall short in proving that?

0:47:33 Lindsey: Some Uh, Yeah, I, I don't see the, the, the evidence presented in this paper is not strong evidence that boomers are narcissists, like, but But again, Like it's Not It's

0:47:57 Thomas: Or just, you know, more narcissistic than some other generations, I guess, would be the actual claim.

0:48:03 Lindsey: It's possible, based on this data, that they're more narcissistic than subsequent generations, that's possible, uh, But I Yeah, no, we really don't, um, But, but, I, I did, so one quick coda, so I was reading, reading around a little bit to see if there were similar studies that looked at, that did look at millennials. And I did find a recent one, it was actually cited in this current article, didn't, you know, didn't do the longitudinal thing, it's cross sectional, blah, blah. But they were lodging some of the same complaints that this article did in terms of how narcissism is often measured in these studies, and talking about facets, and how you need to look at how different facets of narcissism are changing generationally. And when they did that kind of more granular analysis, and they looked specifically at, like, entitlement versus grandiosity versus, like, leadership, right? And, you know, these agentic qualities, those analyses suggested that actually millennials do look less.

0:48:09 Thomas: But we don't know. Okay.

0:49:01 Thomas: Huh.

0:49:02 Lindsey: They're lower on some of the more malignant traits is what that analysis suggests.

0:49:05 Thomas: That's interesting.

0:49:06 Lindsey: So, you know, that's one study, right? But it looks to me like this claim that every, that millennials are more narcissistic, that every generation is becoming more narcissitic. It doesn't really actually seem to be. Doesn't as well supported as some people are claiming.

0:49:18 Thomas: Okay, Yeah. And that is what, what you kind of led off with, so I guess what in my mind I was approaching it more from the perspective of the article. Like, it does the article support this claim that boomers are more narcissistic than millennials, but it's more like, well, that wasn't really what the study was trying to do, and it does sound like the study makes it very unlikely that there's this typical, each generation is getting more self-involved, narcissistic kind of thing, and it doesn't seem to disprove that. Okay.

0:49:18 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:49:30 Lindsey: No.

0:49:43 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. It's, it's not consistent with that. Right. But, but one thing that I think is interesting. So, so let's take those lifespan effects, right. Right. So if everybody is getting slightly less narcissistic across the lifespan, which tracks with me, right, like especially since narcissism is so correlated with like status seeking and all those kinds of things, you expect those to be highest in young adulthood. Right. That's when you're starting your career. That'S when you'RE figuring out your place in the world, all this stuff. So, so if narcissism really is declining, uh, from young adulthood on, um, then, like, maybe that accounts for why older generations think that the kids these days are worse than the kids that came before them. Maybe that's, that's speculative on my part, but, like, yeah, kids, kids really will be like slightly more narcissistic, or at least have, have, uh, be higher on those kinds of traits than older adults. And so that could account for the, you kids these days thing. I don't know. You

0:49:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:50:33 Thomas: Well, yeah I mean, it is kind of always what we thought it was, right? Okay, I'm sad that I can't be, you as mad at boomers as I thought it could be, but maybe that'll be another study yeah I, I, they do still own all the houses that they bought for five dollars, and then they, you know, with their NIMBYism, prevent millennials from owning, from anything. They have to rent forever. And so they have all the money in the world. Millennials are screwed. So there's that. Does this study talk about that?

0:50:45 Lindsey: Still be mad at boomers yeah Uh-huh. Yeah they do and they do still say shitty unjustified things about millennials. Yeah.

0:51:04 Thomas: Yeah. Oh yeah. That too.

0:51:04 Lindsey: Um, is that, is what bothered, that, that is a main, a really big thing that bothers me about these, these arguments that millennials are the, the worst, and all this stuff, is they, they, they look at these things that are really a result of the economic situation being like so much harder and they're calling that entitlement. Really?

0:51:19 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the opposite of that. Yeah. What about gen whatever's next? Z? I can't remember. Have we delved into that at all? Do they have stereotypes? I'm behind the times. Are they supposed to be even more needy and, uh, you know, entitled allegedly? Yeah.

0:51:25 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Gen Z. I would be my prediction, right? That's always what they say. Yeah, I'm not sure. I haven't kept up with the, the generational stereotypes, but yeah

0:51:41 Thomas: Yeah well well, what a little disappointing, uh, in terms of what the study actually said, relative to what the article said, you know, but that's, that's science in the media, I think. Right?

0:51:57 Lindsey: I'm sorry, I'll find you a good boomer suck article for the next episode.

0:51:59 Thomas: It's Well, anything else we need to know from this?

0:52:04 Lindsey: I don't think so. I think those are the big things. Yeah.

0:52:06 Thomas: Well shoot, I mean, I guess I have to, you KNOW, not say that this was something that was proven by science, as I think I probably said after reading this. So that's why we all need Lindsay Osterman to do the debunks for us, everybody. I'm sad, but there you go. That makes more sense. It's pretty much everything's always as disappointing as you expect it to be when it comes to science coverage in the the news. It's always not quite what it says, but still very interesting. And at the very least, if anybody comes at you with the each generation is getting way worse kind of thing, does seem like this contradicts this somewhat.

0:52:26 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:52:42 Lindsey: Yeah. It's hard to reconcile that claim with this data. You know, despite the limitations, I do think it's hard to reconcile the claim with what they're seeing here.

0:52:49 Thomas: Well, as always, thanks for the science breakdown, Lindsay, and thanks Thanks so much for listening, everybody. We'll see you next time.

0:52:52 Lindsey: Thank you.

0:53:03 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com slash SeriousPod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com slash groups slash SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.