Rampant narcissism? Really?
Sunday, 6 March 2011
“New generation infected by narcissism” shouted the headline on last Thursday’s Melbourne ‘Age’, one of Australia’s most respected quality newspapers.
The report under the headline quoted claims by Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, that an “epidemic of narcissism'” has swept across the student population in the past thirty years. Her findings, reported to a conference of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders in Melbourne, were based on a study of 16,000 university students across the US 
that purportedly showed showed 30% were narcissistic in psychological tests, compared with 15% back in 1982. In Professor Twenge’s words, “they are all 18 and 19-year-olds, so this is clearly a generational shift”.
Narcissism is defined by Professor Twenge as the condition of having an inflated sense of self, a lack of empathy, vanity, materialism, and an overblown sense of entitlement. She believes that growing narcissism has resulted in a greater interest in fame and wealth, more plastic surgery, and an increase in attention-seeking crimes, such as (for example) “beating someone up and putting it on YouTube”.
At the conference, Professor Twenge shared her concern about a culture '”that seems to not just accept narcissism but finds it laudatory … It worries me, when I talk to college students, that they are not surprised at all that their generation is more narcissistic. They say, ‘We have to be this way because the world is more competitive.’ But the problem is that narcissism doesn't help you compete. It blows up in your face eventually.” She claimed narcissistic students tended to have poorer results and were more likely to drop out, probably because they thought they didn’t have to study as they were already smart, labelling such thinking ‘delusional’.
Is there any truth in these claims? Are the findings of a researcher in San Diego able to be generalised on a global scale?
At one level, claims that young people are narcissistic seem inevitable given the nature of modern media and advertising, which often seems to drive vanity and the cult of self from an early age. It could be almost self-evident to expect an epidemic of narcissism in such a media environment. In mainstream media, those who display humility are often labelled as “geeks”, and careers that focus on building up society are labelled as “dead-end”. As one reader commented on “The Age” website, “the age of self-
obsession will deliver the desired income to fashion houses and plastic surgeons, and rivers of gold to the pharmaceutical companies that produce anti-depressants.”
On the other hand, as a different reader somewhat comically quipped “This article didn’t mention my name once, so I just lost interest.”
The thing is – I simply do not see the narcissism that Professor Twenge claims is rife.
I have students from almost 80 different countries in my school, and they are very close to the age range that she has investigated. However, every one of my students spends hours upon hours every week engaging in voluntary service activities that help the elderly, the disadvantaged, the disempowered, the weak, the alienated, and those that others in society neglect or forget. They voluntarily make huge, passionately driven efforts to improve the quality of the environment and promote sustainability. Most aim to enter careers that will help to make the world a better place, with wealth and income rarely being identified as their top priority.
Maybe the kind of students that apply to enter United World Colleges are different from the mainstream. That is probably true in many cases; you have to be a fairly brave risk-taker to take on the challenges of living away from home in a diverse, multi-national group of high achieving young idealists. However, I simply can’t accept that our students are SO counter-cultural that they are the absolute antithesis of youth in general.
And as if to emphasise the point, our students are all about to spend the coming week off class working full-time in small groups in various parts of south-east Asia, performing a multitude of voluntary service activities. For example, we have two groups travelling to Cambodia. One group will perform construction work at an orphanage, waterproofing and painting school facilities. The other Cambodian group will work with children at a school, while also providing some help with gardening and painting. Another group will travel to Sichuan (China) where they will help with rebuilding wildlife habitats, especially those environments that support the giant pandas near Dujiangyan.
Five groups will travel to Thailand for various projects. One will help with teaching in a local school while also providing some help with construction work. The second group will perform tree planting as an 
environmental service. The third will help with construction of a new children’s playground in a remote area near the Thai-Burmese border. The fourth group will perform conservation service activities with animals, while the fifth work in a village where elephants are raised to promote public education on recycling.
Five other groups will travel to various parts of Malaysia. One group will promote ecologically sustainable projects at a butterfly farm in Penang. Another group will provide service assistance to the needy in Kuala Lumpur. A third group will assist with the construction of sand enclosures at a turtle sanctuary. A fourth group will assist with tree planting at an orang-utan rehabilitation centre in Borneo, while the fifth group will be engaged with coral monitoring in east Malaysia.
Four other groups of students will be performing service work in support of TraffickLink, the College’s anti human trafficking group. Three groups will work in refuges in Cambodia and Thailand, while a fourth group will engage in anti-trafficking educational work in Singapore.
Of course, there is a somewhat sad school of psychological thought that claims there is no such thing as ethical altruism – there is only ethical egoism. This argument claims that anyone who acts altruistically is really just motivated to serve others for the praise, the adulation and the ego boost that the altruism brings. For example, one advocate of this approach is Sandra LaFave, a psychologist at West Valley College in 
Saratoga, California, who goes so far as to claim on her website that “we wouldn’t say Mother Teresa is altruistic; we’d say that she’s self-interested; she’s using the poor to attain to attain her own long-term spiritual goals”.
It’s always hard to have a rational argument with a psychologist such as LaFave, because if we were to quote evidence and data, such as the huge commitment to community and environmental service by my students, it would simply elicit an unsubstantiated assertion such as that my students felt that they were forced to do it, or that my students weren’t being open and honest in expressing their true feelings or declaring their true motivation, or suchlike. That response might have a glimmer of authenticity if (for example) very few of my students continued their commitment to service activities after they started university. But most of them do - and indeed many UWC alumni focus their entire lives and careers on helping others, often at great personal and financial cost to themselves.
Is this evidence of rampant narcissism? I think not.
A scene from the Peer Support Art Afternoon in the Courtyard on Friday afternoon
