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Over on Twitter about an hour ago, I came across a tweet that said a new study had found that “Social Ntwks make college students more narcissistic.” I’m always interested in the latest research on student culture, so I clicked.
The link took me to a USA Today article on the study. The article doesn’t quite make the claim in the tweet, but it does make some other arguments that are well worth unpacking. (The study itself doesn’t appear to be online anywhere. If anyone reading this finds it, or can get access to it, let me know in comments.)
The tweet I quoted above makes a cause-and-effect claim: that social networking makes students more narcissistic. The lead sentence of the USA Today piece makes a similar, but slightly weaker, claim: that students believe that social networking makes them more narcissistic. But neither of these claims are backed up by the data that follows.
The article is based on the answers to two questions. Students were asked whether their peers “used social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for self-promotion, narcissism and attention-seeking,” and they were asked whether they agreed that their generation was “more self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking than previous generations.” A bit more than half (57%) answered yes to the first question, and 66% agreed “strongly” or “somewhat” with the second statement.
The first thing to point here is that there’s no claim of causality in the students’ answers. Most of them think that their peers (some of them? all of them? a few of them? the article doesn’t say) engage in attention-seeking behavior online (occasionally? frequently? incessantly?). And most of them think their peers are more prone to attention-seeking behavior than previous generations. But the answers provided in the article don’t give any indication that they think social networks themselves are the cause of this behavior, much less any evidence that such a cause-and-effect relationship actually exists.
So the Twitter soundbite version of the study is bunk — the survey doesn’t show that social networking makes people more narcissistic. And the weaknesses of the study don’t end there.
A second big problem is that the survey questions are muddled. Every blogger I know uses social networks for “self-promotion,” and to the extent that seeking attention for your writing is “attention seeking,” I guess they all do that too. But I wouldn’t call that behavior narcissistic, and I don’t think it makes much sense at all to frame the question as if it was. Self-promotion and narcissism aren’t the same thing. They’re not even close to the same thing — nobody thinks USA Today’s own self-promoting Twitter feed is narcissistic.
And here’s a third problem: what basis do young people have for assessing how “self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking” their parents’ generation was in their youth, much less their grandparents or great-grandparents? They weren’t there. They don’t know.
What they do know is how previous generations, and their own peers, are perceived in popular culture, and the perception of youth as “self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking” is a pop culture cliche. So that second question really only measures the degree to which young people have embraced society’s negative image of them.
And this is where we really go down the rabbit hole.
Where does the perception of today’s young people as narcissistic come from? In large part it comes from the work of researchers like Jean Twenge, who’s written two books and dozens of articles making exactly that argument. Twenge’s most recent project? She’s the author of the study we’re talking about today.
So here’s how it works. Writers come up with the idea — valid or invalid — that today’s youth are narcissists. They write books and publish op-eds and go on talk shows and give quotes to journalists and do public speaking engagements pushing this idea. Then, with their perspective embedded in popular culture, one of them, Twenge, conducts a survey asking young people what they think of it. Most of those young people, having been fed that story for years, admit that it’s at least “somewhat” accurate. And then that survey is presented as evidence that the theory is true.
Jean Twenge graduated from high school in the 1980s, a time when the popular media were full of stories about the entitlement and self-absorption of the nation’s youth. Her parents came of age in the 1960s, an era whose young people were widely condemned as narcissistic by their parents. As strange as it may seem now, the youth of the early 1940s faced similar charges, and anyone who’s ever read an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel knows that the same stereotype was rampant in the 1920s.
Are today’s youth more narcissistic than their parents were at their age? Maybe. I’m not sure that the question is a particularly meaningful one, but it’s possible that I could be convinced that it is, and that Twenge’s answer to it is the right one.
But what I do know for sure is that every generation thinks their children are more frivolous and more selfish than they were as youths, and that every generation is eager to consume “research” that supports this self-perception. Every generation loves to read about how great they are, and how the kids of today just don’t measure up.
And if I had to sum up that attitude in a single word?
I’d be tempted to call it narcissism.
In reading about the book The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, which I mentioned here last week, I stumbled upon the website of an interesting museum exhibit that’s currently up here in New York.
Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges traces the history of several dozen German Jewish professors who, after fleeing Nazi Germany, took teaching positions at segregated colleges in the American South. According to the website, the exhibit emphasizes the relationships that grew up between these professors and their students, and the effect that this unusual meeting of cultures had on both groups.
The exhibit runs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan through January. I’ll report back after my visit.
A San Jose State University computer science student has won a victory in a struggle over control of his academic work.
Kyle Brady was threatened with punishment by a professor for posting code he had written for a class assignment online. (Brady wanted to make his code available to other programmers, his prof thought that making it public would facilitate cheating among students who were given the same assignment in the future.) Brady appealed his prof’s decision, and the university took his side.
As Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow says, this ruling affirms fundamental principles about the teacher/student relationship:
Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students. But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience. … Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension.
That’s worth saying again, I think. “The convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience.” Exactly.
When I heard about Wolfram Alpha, I was tickled. It didn’t strike me as anything like a Google-killer, but I did think it had the potential to be a powerful research tool. Historians (and activists) often want to get their hands on quantitative data that can be hard to track down, and if Wolfram makes that tracking down easier, that’ll be a big deal.
So I plugged in some obvious search terms for scholars of higher education, along with a few big subjects from the history of student activism, to see what Wolfram Alpha would turn up.
For the most part, it turned up nothing. When I searched…
It seems like every month or so there’s a big media buzz around another deeply flawed study that claims to confirm negative stereotypes about American college students. In February it was the one that explored students’ supposed “sense of entitlement” in the classroom, in March it was the one that claimed that students spend more time drinking than studying.
In April it was the one from Ohio State University researcher Aryn Karpinski that found that Facebook users have lower grades than students who aren’t on FB. It was only a draft paper, based on a small group of students from one college, but it made a huge splash all over the world.
And now it turns out that it’s pretty much worthless as scholarship.
A new response from three scholars in the field (Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai) looks closely at the Facebook study, and finds it incredibly weak. In comparing the grades of students who use and don’t use Facebook, for instance, one needs a substantial number in each category, but this study’s sample only included 15 non-FB undergrads. It also found major differences in Facebook adoption across majors, but made no effort to determine whether it was those population differences, rather than an actual tie to Facebook use, that was responsible for grade variation.
At least as important, the response looks at data obtained from three large studies, and found no significant connection between Facebook use and low grades. Indeed, one set of data suggested that Facebook use was, as the authors put it, “slightly more common among individuals with higher grades.”
As for Karpinski, despite the fact that she was quoted as saying that there was a “disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing that they had lower grades,” and despite the fact that she invited administrators “to find ways to limit access [to Facebook] … resulting in better academic performance,” she now says her findings were just “exploratory,” and that she never intended them to be seen as conclusive.
“People, she says, “need to chill out.”
Afternoon update: In the interest of fairness and completeness, here’s a link to Karpinski’s original conference presentation and to her rebuttal to the three scholars’ response to it. (She argues that their study has “serious methodological and statistical flaws” of its own.)
Late afternoon update: And here’s a link to Pasek, more, and Hargittai’s rebuttal to the rebuttal, courtesy of Hargittai.
studentactivism.net 
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