Kali Trzesniewski

Who they are

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

The paper answers a specific popular claim. The label Generation Me, associated with Jean Twenge's work, describes a cohort said to be more individualistic and self-regarding than those before it. Trzesniewski and Donnellan tested that claim against a long-running survey that asks national samples of American high school seniors the same questions in successive years.

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 data are about 477,000 seniors surveyed between 1976 and 2006. The authors found little meaningful change over thirty years in egotism, self-esteem, locus of control, happiness, loneliness or antisocial behaviour. 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. The effect sizes were small, and the authors conclude that there is little evidence of strong or widespread cohort-linked change in these traits.

Key ideas

The design is a time-lag comparison: people of the same age, in this case seniors, are compared across decades, which holds age fixed. That is why the paper can speak about cohorts at all, and why it is a stronger test than a single survey of young and old people.

Two points help in reading it. First, its variables are self-views and attitudes, such as egotism and self-esteem. It does not measure work values. The Twenge study of the same survey asked what seniors want from work, and found leisure values up by 0.57 standard deviations between Baby Boomers and Generation Me. The two studies differ more in what they measured than in what they found.

Second, a change shared with the wider population points to the period and not to the birth group. The authors' note that the cynicism of later seniors mirrored the wider population is an example. A time-lag design cannot fully exclude period effects, a limitation that the Twenge paper also states.

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