Brent Donnellan

Who they are

At the time of the paper's release in 2010, Donnellan was reported as working at Michigan State University. The sources used for this site do not give a current position, so this page does not state one.

His place on this site rests on one paper and on the question it answers. The paper tests whether the cohort born in the later decades of the twentieth century is more self-centred than those before it, using the same survey questions asked of national samples of seniors in each year from 1976 to 2006.

Key papers

Trzesniewski, K. H., & Donnellan, M. B. (2010). Rethinking "Generation Me": A study of cohort effects from 1976-2006. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(1), 58-75.

The paper reports little meaningful change over thirty years in egotism, self-esteem, locus of control, happiness, loneliness and antisocial behaviour, with small effect sizes. Later seniors reported less fear of social problems, more cynicism, less trust and higher educational expectations. The authors noted that the cynicism mirrored the wider population.

Key ideas

The paper's contribution is a method as much as a result. Comparing seniors in 1976 with seniors in 2006 at the same age holds age fixed, so a difference is more plausibly a difference of cohort or period. Where a change appears in the wider population too, as the cynicism did, the period is the likelier explanation.

It also shows why the same survey can support different headlines. The Twenge study of work values, drawn from the same survey series, found moderate cohort differences in what seniors say they want from work. This paper found small ones in self-views. Neither contradicts the other, because they measured different things.

For a reader, the usable lesson is to ask what was measured, at what age, and whether the same question was asked in earlier decades. A claim about a generation that cannot answer those three questions has not been shown.

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