Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  WHO CARES WHAT YOU THINK?

  Not caring what others think may also explain the apparent decline in manners and politeness. GenMe’ers do not believe there is one right way of doing things, and most were never taught the rules of etiquette. When that means wearing white shoes after Labor Day and using whatever fork you want, no problem. But most etiquette was developed to provide something often lacking in modern life: respect for other people’s comfort. “Society has gotten increasingly callous and me-centered, and we’re fed up with [the results],” says Corinne Gregory, founder of a class called the PoliteChild. A high school teacher told me that she noticed her students don’t “clean up nice”—they find it difficult not to swear and to speak more formally when necessary. They talk to older people and authority figures the same way they talk to their friends. A business book relates the story of a company founder who visited one of his shops and asked a young employee how she was doing. “Well, a little hungover this morning, but okay,” she replied.

  A recent article related numerous stories of young job applicants’ lack of perspective, from answering their cell phones during the interview to bringing their parents. Jaime Fall, vice president of the HR Policy Association, says GenMe’s mind-set is “You’re perfect just the way you are—do whatever you’re comfortable doing”—an attitude that can backfire in interviews. “Life has gotten more casual,” observes Mara Swan, executive vice president at Manpower. “They don’t realize [the interview] is a sales event.”

  It goes beyond manners—people today are less likely to follow all kinds of social rules. Business professor John Trinkaus finds that fewer people now slow down in a school zone, and fewer observe the item limit in a supermarket express lane. More people cut across parking lots to bypass stoplights. In 1979, 29% of people failed to stop at a particular stop sign in a New York suburb, but by 1996 a stunning 97% of drivers did not stop at all. In Trinkaus’s most ironic finding, the number of people who paid the suggested fee for lighting a candle at a Catholic church decreased from 92% to 25% between the late 1990s and 2006. In other words, 75% of people cheated the church out of money in the most recent observation.

  Cheating is also rampant among students. A 2008 study found that 95% of high school students said they had cheated. That included 64% who have cheated on a test by copying from someone else or using crib notes. The rest merely told classmates what would be on a test, but, according to researcher Donald McCabe, most students don’t even count that as cheating. Another survey found that 34% of high school students admitted to cheating on an exam in 1969, which rose to 61% in 1992 (GenX) and to an incredible 74% in 2002 (the first wave of GenMe). Fortunately, fewer in the second wave of GenMe, 51%, reported cheating on an exam in 2012. Of course, that’s still the majority and may underestimate the actual number. High levels of cheating continue into college; a 2002 survey found that 80% of students at Texas A&M University admitted to cheating; a 2007 poll of students at 12 different colleges found that 67% admitted to cheating.

  Although competition for grades may have fueled the increase, attitudes have shifted along with the behavior. In a 2012 study of 25,000 high school students, 57% agreed that “in the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.” In other words, the majority believed that the ends justified the means. McCabe has found this attitude especially prevalent in business schools, characterized by a “get-it-done, damn-the-torpedoes, succeed-at-all-costs mentality.” “According to my research,” McCabe wrote in Harvard Business Review, “the mind-set of most MBAs—bottom line—is to get the highest GPA possible, regardless of the means. After all, the students with the highest GPAs get the best shot at the six-figure jobs.”

  This breakdown in consideration and loyalty, and the increase in cheating, reaches all the way to the top. Business scandals, such as those at WorldCom and Enron, demonstrated that many people have little problem with breaking rules and telling lies in an attempt to make more money. The mortgage meltdown of the late 2000s was a quite spectacular example of this as well, with banks continuing to get rich as ordinary Americans lost jobs and had their homes foreclosed. In psychology and medicine, several researchers were recently shown to have published dozens of papers based on fraudulent data. Even honest businesses disregard other time-tested social rules, such as loyalty to employees. Companies are now more likely to raid pension funds and engage in mass layoffs to prop up a sinking stock price. Others ship jobs overseas if it will save money. “Downsizing” and “outsourcing” are the modern corporate equivalents of rudeness—and a lot more devastating. Because GenMe’ers grew up with this kind of ruthlessness, it should not surprise us that they think little of some occasional homework copying. It also suggests that the corporations of the future are going to need much stricter oversight to make sure that cheating and scams are kept to a minimum. Cheating on tests easily translates to cheating on the balance sheet. Expect to see more laws like Sarbanes-Oxley that ask corporations to prove that they are not cheating their stockholders. Even with these laws, more stock reports, research, and articles will have to be taken with a grain of salt—in an increasingly competitive world, the temptation to cheat will be ever stronger for GenMe.

  CALL ME BETH

  Boomers laid claim to the phrase question authority during the 1960s.

  But GenMe doesn’t just question authority—they disregard it entirely.

  “Older generations trusted God, the church, government, and elders,” says Kevin, 22. “I have questioned things and people that earlier generations never would have thought to.” This is the eventual outcome of increased informality and the loosening of social rules, and many people would rightly argue that questioning things is good. Sometimes “traditions” are outmoded and need challenging.

  But sometimes GenMe takes the questioning of authority a little too far. Education professor Maureen Stout tells the story of a young man in her class who did not turn in his research paper. “After a lot of excuses and arguments he finally came out with it,” Stout writes. “He believed he was entitled to do just as he pleased and refused to recognize my authority, as the instructor, to determine what the assignments in the class should be. It was as simple as that.” Former journalist Peter Sacks related his frustration with the community college students he taught in his second career, observing that they seemed uncomfortable with “the idea that my knowledge and skills were important or even relevant.” Student after student balked when he corrected their essays, several complaining that his comments were “just your opinion.”

  I recognized this phrase immediately, as I’d heard it over and over from my own students. I heard this complaint even when I corrected obvious errors such as run-on sentences and incorrect punctuation, things that were clearly not a matter of opinion. Even multiple-choice tests weren’t free from this kind of challenge. In one class, I decided it might be a good idea to review the correct answers to exam questions—it would be a way to correct misconceptions and help the students learn, I thought. Almost immediately, several students began to argue with me about the questions, claiming that the answers they had chosen were right. Since there wasn’t a grading mistake, I was forced to explain again why the answers were correct, but they continued to argue. It was the worst class I’d ever had. After it was over, an older student—who had not been one of the arguers—came up to me and said with disbelief, “Twenty years ago when I got my first degree, we never questioned teachers like that.”

  Apparently I was not alone. In a recent survey of college faculty, 61% reported that students had “verbally disrespected you or challenged your authority during class.” Sixty-five percent said a student had “continuously rolled his/her eyes, frowned, or otherwise showed disdain while you were teaching.” Many students have found their cell phones ringing during class—an honest mistake—but the new twist is to answer and conduct a conversation. Sixty-one percent of professors said they’d experienced this. They were the lucky ones:
24% said they had received “hostile or threatening communications (e-mails, letters, phone messages) from a student,” and 29% said “a student yelled or screamed” at them.

  New teaching philosophies sometimes explicitly acknowledge faculty’s lack of authority. When Sacks, the community college professor, complained to a colleague about the lack of respect he experienced, she advised him to adopt the more informal approach that she used. In her first class, she always announced, “I have some expertise and you have some expertise. My job is to facilitate this process. And please call me Beth.”

  The message: We are all equals here. I might have more education and years of work experience, but that doesn’t mean I know any more than you. This is a lot of the reason for the crumbling of authority and the new acceptance of questioning those in charge. This can have benefits for the free exchange of ideas and engaged student learning, but clearly has downsides as well. This new democracy in education and the workplace has been energized by the new informality in dress and names. While the boss was once “Mr. Smith” or “Mrs. Jones,” bosses are now “Mike” or “Linda.” Mr. and Mrs. sound too stiff and formal—and old-fashioned. When we’re all on a first-name basis, the specter of authority takes yet another step back into the shadows of a previous era. That can bring us closer, but it can also set the stage for more disrespect and conflict.

  The curriculum reflects this lack of a central authority as well. It is no longer enough to teach only the “classics”; these are now known as DWMs (Dead White Males). Few academics still agree that there is a “canon” of Western literature that all students should learn. Instead, students must take classes teaching a variety of perspectives, in which the works of women and minorities are also covered. Whether you agree or disagree with this “multicultural” approach to education, it’s clear that we no longer answer to one definite authority. There are many opinions, and each is considered valuable. Though this has many advantages, it does mean that people will be much less likely to conform to societal rules—after all, which rules would they follow? Which culture or society is “right”? GenMe is taught that none of them is, or all of them are.

  Unless it’s the Internet. Like most people old enough to remember a pre-Internet world, I marvel that we ever got along without it. (How did we find movie showtimes in the early 1990s? Oh, yeah, that weird recording where a teenager with acting aspirations would read off the movies and times.) As fantastic as the Internet is for research, it also democratizes the sources of information. Suddenly, you don’t have to write a textbook or have a column in a major newspaper for thousands of people to read your words—just put up a Web page or a blog, and eventually someone, and maybe even lots of people, will stumble across it. In this environment, there is no authority: information is free, diffuse, and comes from everyone. (Whether it is correct is another matter.) In many Internet situations, you can abandon social roles entirely. Want to be a different age or sex? Go ahead. As a famous New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs in conversation puts it, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Parental authority also isn’t what it used to be. “Parents are no longer eager to be ‘parents.’ They want to love and guide their children as a trusted friend,” says family studies professor Robert Billingham. Chicago-area parent Richard Shields says that his 17-year-old son is his best friend. He prefers them to have fun together rather than impose strict rules or discipline. “It’s better for them to see our values and decide to gain them for themselves,” he says.

  This also means that children play a much larger role in family decisions. The kids who chose their own outfits as preschoolers have grown into teenagers who help their parents choose which car to buy or even where to live. A Chicago Sun-Times article interviewed a large group of teens and their families, finding one where a teenage daughter helped her father decide on a new job, and another where the two teenage kids make all of the home-decorating and electronics-purchasing decisions. Forty percent of teens see their opinions as “very important” in making family decisions. In an earlier era of greater parental authority, that percentage would have been close to zero. One family’s two daughters convinced their parents to buy a second car. “I always stress to my girls to be opinionated,” said Christine Zapata, the girls’ mother. “I guess that sort of backfires on me sometimes.”

  I wonder what will happen when this generation have their own children. Will they continue the move toward lesser parental authority or insist that they retain the authority they have grown accustomed to? If GenMe teaches our own children to be individualistic as well, we may have a full-scale battle of the wills once our kids become teenagers themselves.

  BEING DIFFERENT IS GOOD, EVEN WHEN YOU’RE GETTING MARRIED

  As one of society’s most long-lived traditions, marriage and weddings illustrate the move away from social rules better than anything else. In 1957, 80% of people said that those who didn’t marry were “sick, neurotic, or immoral.” Now, when and whether you marry is considered a personal choice. Many do not: in 2012, 41% of babies in the United States were born to unmarried women—compared to 5% in 1960. Among women under 30 who gave birth in 2009, the majority were unmarried. The social rule that you should be married before you have a baby has all but fallen by the wayside. Many of these couples live together, but 39% of cohabitating couples break up within the first five years of a child’s life (compared to 13% of those who are married). Art has imitated life, with single mothers portrayed more often on TV, with reactions shifting from outrage in the 1980s (Murphy Brown) to barely a peep in the 2000s (Friends). By 2013, the sitcom The New Normal portrayed a gay couple having a child using a surrogate—just as several gay celebrities (such as Elton John and Neil Patrick Harris) have done. Overall, this generation is much more likely to accept that there are many ways to make a family. When nearly half of babies are born to single parents, who has time to criticize them all?

  Whom you marry is also much more up to the individual. My parents, a Catholic and a Lutheran (though both white and alike in every other way), had a “mixed marriage” when they wed in 1967. People in my mother’s Minnesota hometown whispered about it behind cupped hands for weeks. Now this religious difference would be considered too minor to even be discussed.

  Interracial marriage has become much more common, more than doubling since 1980 and accounting for more than 1 in 7 US marriages in 2010. Yet until the Supreme Court struck down miscegenation laws in 1967, whites and blacks could not legally marry each other in sixteen states. The last antimiscegenation law was not officially repealed until November 2000, in Alabama. Now these unions are everywhere, and between almost all ethnicities and races. My next-door neighbors for three years were a Mexican American man and his half-Jewish, half-Italian wife, and I’ve lost count of the number of Asian-white marriages among people I know. Almost half of Asian women will marry a white man. In 2012, 86% of Americans—including 93% of GenMe—agreed “I think it’s all right for blacks and whites to date each other,” up from 48% in 1987. Sixty percent of twenty-somethings said they had dated someone from a different racial or ethnic background. In 2009, only 36% of Boomers said that more people of different races marrying one another has been a change for the better, compared to 60% of GenMe. Asked if they would be comfortable with someone in their family marrying someone of a different race, 55% of Boomers said yes, compared to 85% of GenMe.

  Many young people I’ve talked to mention interracial dating as the biggest difference between them and their parents: many of their peers date across racial lines, but their parents don’t agree with this. Several young women from Texas and North Carolina told me that if they dated a black man, their fathers would meet the poor guy at the door with a shotgun. Yet most of GenMe finds this perplexing: Who cares what race someone is? In one survey, only 10% of white young people said that marrying someone from their own ethnic group was important; however, 45% said it was important to their parents. Of young Asian Americans, 32% said same-ethnic-gr
oup marriage was important to them, but 68% said it was important to their parents. As YouTube star Kevin Wu, 19, said, “My parents like to constantly remind me that when I grow up I have to marry an Asian wife. Which is okay, I like Asian women, but I don’t like narrowing my options. Girls are like a bag of M&Ms—they’re all different colors on the outside, but on the inside, they’re all the same, and they all taste good.” He continues, “No one opens a bag of M&Ms and goes, hey, I’m only eating the yellow ones. You know why? Because that’s racist. . . . I think the only way we can stop racism is to have more interracial babies.” Interracial marriage is likely to become even more common in the future as more and more young people meet and date people from different backgrounds.

  When we marry our other-race, other-religion, and possibly same-sex partners, we don’t follow all of the wedding rules of previous generations. In the mid-1960s, Brides magazine insisted that “the only correct colors” for wedding invitations “are white, ivory, or cream, with absolutely no decorations such as borders, flower sprays, and so on.” In other words, your invitation had to look just like everyone else’s. Now people use wedding invitations in every possible theme and color—and wording. When my parents lived near Dallas, they received a wedding invitation with a picture of a cowboy and cowgirl inviting guests to “c’mon over for a big weddin’ to-do.” The reply-card choices were “Yes, we’ll be there with our boots on” and “Shucks, we can’t make it.”