"Young people today"

The decline story has a favourite target, and you've probably said it and probably heard your parents say it and possibly heard your grandparents say it about your parents. Young people today. They don't read. They don't respect anyone. They're not as sharp.

John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler, in 2019, ran five preregistered studies with nearly three and a half thousand American adults, and found what you'd expect. Adults believe today's young people are worse than the young people of the past. Then they looked at who believed what, and found the pattern that matters. People who scored highly on respect for authority especially thought young people were less respectful. People who scored highly on intelligence tests especially thought young people were less intelligent. People who read a lot especially thought young people read less. Each person saw decline in the trait where they themselves stood high, and nowhere else.

The researchers proposed two mechanisms. One is that people notice the limitations of others where they themselves excel. A great reader notices non-readers the way a tall person notices low doorways. The other is the one this book keeps meeting, which is a memory bias. People project their present qualities onto their memory of the young people of their own youth. The well-read adult remembers the young people of nineteen ninety-six as readers, because the well-read adult was a reader, and their friends were, and everyone else has faded. Then they compare the present's young people, all of them, hot, against a remembered youth that has been quietly edited to look like themselves, and a decline appears.

It's a finding about the trait and the observer and not about young people, and that's the point. The young people haven't changed in the ways the complaint says. The complaint has been made, the researchers note, for millennia, and if it were true, humanity would have run out of readers some time before the Romans.

You can catch yourself doing this and it's one of the easier ones to catch. When "young people today" arrives, ask which of your own qualities it's about. It will almost always be a quality you're proud of. Then ask whether the young people you actually knew in your own youth, all of them, and not just the friends who've survived the fade, had it either. They didn't. You were the young person of somebody's decline story, and here you are.