Title: ‘The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement’

Author: Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell

Release date: April 21, 2009

Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell say college students are currently facing an epidemic: They are in love with themselves.

Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of ‘Generation Me,’ and Campbell, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and the author of ‘When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself,’ recently released a study and book of their findings. The book, ‘The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement,’ says narcissistic personality traits have been increasing since the 1980s, at a rate that’s comparable to that of obesity.

Twenge and Campbell examined data from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, including survey answers of college students across the country between the years 1982 and 2006.

‘The average college student has become only a little more narcissistic, but there are almost twice as many students now who answer the majority of questions in the narcissistic direction – now 25 percent,’ Twenge said in an e-mail interview. ‘People notice a doubling like that. I think it’s this minority of college students who are giving the group a bad name, even though 75 percent are not that narcissistic.’ The increase is particularly significant among women, Twenge and Campbell say in their book.

The book’s examples of increasing narcissism – which are evident in other demographics, in addition to college students – include the rise of credit card debt, ego-inflated reality TV stars, interest in plastic surgery and the use of performance-enhancing drugs. The Internet is another reason, they say, with the recent ‘social networking explosion’ and aspiring YouTube stars.

‘We didn’t have to look very hard to find it. It was everywhere,’ Campbell and Twenge wrote in the introduction of their book. ‘On a reality TV show, a girl planning her sixteenth birthday party wants a major road blocked off so a marching band can precede her grand entrance on a red carpet. A book called ‘My Beautiful Mommy’ explains plastic surgery to young children whose mothers are going under the knife for the trendy ‘Mommy Makeover.”

But the book was not published without controversy.

Kali Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of the University of Western Ontario (Canada) psychology department, and her research team examined similar data using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, but they determined that there is not enough evidence to say that narcissism amongst college students is an epidemic. Twenge, Trzesniewski said, multiplied the data to account for 30 years, making the results seem more significant.

‘The difference is really just in the interpretation. … We didn’t think it was worth calling it an ‘epidemic’ if there’s less than a one-point scale increase over a five-year period, and we don’t think it’s very valid to just multiply that out and assume that you can take that five-year period and multiple it by six, and now you have a 30-year period,’ Trzesniewski said.

Twenge says her data is more reliable than Trzesniewski’s, since her team used data from students across the country. Trzesniewski’s data focused only on students in northern California.

But in addition to analyzing data from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, Trzesniewski also compared survey results of high school seniors. The responses date back to 1976 and ask students to judge how intelligent they are compared to their peers. She determined that there have not been any significant changes in the results during the past three decades.

To learn more about Twenge and Campbell’s research and judge for yourself, read ‘The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement,’ released by Free Press April 21, 2009.

bmdavies@syr.edu

Published on April 27, 2009 at 12:00 pm