Imperfect memories could be the source of complaints about younger generations. John Protzko, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, refers to this phenomenon as the “kids these days effect.”
“Humanity has been lodging the same complaints against ‘kids these days’ for at least 2,600 years,”
says Protzko. The only reason he limited his estimate at 2,600 years was because some of the older statements could not be verified.
However, it’s easy to envision grownups throughout waving their fists at their children.
”Youth were never more sawcie…the ancient are scorned, the honorable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded,”
wrote minister Thomas Barnes of St. Margaret’s Church in 1624, for example.
“It’s the exact same complaints time after time — they’re disrespectful, they don’t listen to their elders, and they don’t like to work,”
Protzko said. He observed that these grievances transcend not only generations, but also different cultures.
Kids These Days
Protzko points out that civilization has not been continuously declining since 340 BCE. Rather, he argues, the older generation’s proclivity to criticize its youth stems from our faulty memories.
“There is a psychological or mental trick that happens that makes it appear to each generation that the subsequent generations are objectively in decline, even though they’re not,”
said Protzko. And because it’s ingrained in the way the mind works, each generation is subjected to it repeatedly.
Despite the prevalence of this effect — or possibly because of it — little research has been performed to investigate it. Protzko and colleague psychologist Jonathan Schooler designed a battery of five tests to investigate this psychological illusion.
Trait-specific Hypothesis
The researchers initially examined how this pertains to an individual’s standing on a trait. Regarding three specific characteristics — respect for authority, intellect, and enjoyment of reading — researchers asked participants to rate the children of today in comparison to themselves as children.
Across the board, it was clear that the higher the participants ranked themselves on those traits, the more likely they were to denigrate the children based on those same traits, supporting the researchers’ “trait-specific” hypothesis.
“The more you respect authority as an adult, the more you think kids no longer respect their elders; the smarter you are, the more you think kids these days are getting dumber. And people who are well-read tend to think that kids these days no longer like to read,”
Protzko said.
And, in terms of intelligence, this is especially significant, according to Protzko, because objective evidence has shown that youth perform better on intelligence tests due to Flynn effects (the measurable increase in IQ scores from generation to generation).
“So it can’t be the case that the participants are picking up on objective truth,”
he said.
Extrapolating Backwards
So why do we make wrong assumptions about the generations that come after us? Protzko says that our skewed memories are to blame.
“We tend to think our memories are really good for the past,” he says, “but they aren’t.”
To investigate the impact of memory on our attitudes toward kids now, the researchers duplicated the reading study and then included questions regarding the participants’ memories of how much they and their peers enjoyed reading as youngsters. They also inquired about their thoughts on “adults these days” and their passion for reading.
The more well-read you are, the more you believe you enjoyed reading as a child, and the more you believe all children enjoyed reading when you were a youngster, according to their findings. As a result, it appears to us that today’s youngsters are objectively inferior.
“Basically, what we do is take our current standing on that trait and we impose it back in time,”
Protzko explained.
Not only that, he says, but we also extend our opinion to our peers, so people who consider themselves to have been well-read as children recall that children in general were similarly well-read. In addition, the responses indicating that adults enjoy reading as much as they did as children suggest that participants are not perceiving a constant generational decline, but rather believe that today’s deficient individuals are exclusively children.
Presentism
The researchers conducted one more experiment to better understand the role of memory as a mediator. They examined participants’ reading abilities but provided misleading feedback.
They informed some of them that they were in the top 33% or bottom 33% of the national population. It turns out that doing so alters participants’ perceptions of their own ability to read.
The feedback even prompted individuals to reconsider their memories of the past. When researchers asked them about their views on kids today and their reading habits, those who scored “low” not only generalized their performance to kids in the past (e.g., kids in the past weren’t very well-read), but also softened their views on the supposed decline of kids today in terms of reading.
“These things aren’t necessarily happening consciously,”
Protzko said of the phenomenon memory researchers call “presentism. This bias, he thinks, is so deeply embedded in our memory systems that it’s unlikely we’ll ever stop believing that today’s children represent a decline in our society.
“It’s a memory tic — you take what you presently are and you impose that on your memories,”
he said,
That is why the ‘decline’ appears to be so clear to us. We have little objective information regarding what children were like, and even less personal experience. All we have to rely on is our recollection and the biases that come with it.
Reference:
- John Protzko, Jonathan W. Schooler. Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking. Sci. Adv. 5, eaav5916 (2019). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aav5916
Top image credit: Susan Jane Golding CC-BY
Last Updated on December 16, 2023