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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.
Via Kevin Prentiss (@kprentiss on Twitter) comes a link to the University of North Alabama’s Sidewalk Chalk Reservation Form.
The form states — in all caps, bolded, and underlined — that “chalking on university sidewalks requires reservations and approval from designated building supervisors or other assigned personnel.”
Chalking also requires, according to the form, advance notice and reservation of space. It requires compliance with a five-point list of restrictions, including a prohibition on chalking near doorways, near the university amphitheater, or with non-pastel chalk. “Chalking,” it states, “is only to be used to beautify the image of the UNA campus and to promote the organization using it.” Violation of any of the above rules will, according to the form, subject the organization responsible to a fine “in excess of $150.”
Over on Twitter, Kevin is a little abashed about linking to the form (“Apologies to the uni involved. I’m sure this is common.”), but I’ve got no such qualms. This is no way to run a university. Hell, it’d be no way to run a junior high.
The university is a community, and its public spaces are, in a very real sense, student space. If a little chalk dust gets tracked into the dining hall, or folks attending a concert at the amphitheater have to run a gauntlet of chalked announcements for Take Back the Night and the chemistry club semi-formal, that goes with the territory. It’s part of being a university.
UNA hands out the Sidewalk Chalk Reservation form — and free chalk! — at its Office of Student Engagement. But you can’t foster student engagement by treating students like guests. When you make students fill out a form to reserve sidewalk space for chalking. You’re telling them that they’re interlopers on campus. You’re telling them that this is your university, not theirs.
And you shouldn’t be surprised when they decide to take it back.
Members of the Iranian parliament are repudiating last night’s government attack on students in dormitories at Tehran University, and the parliament’s speaker has appointed a committee to investigate the event.
According to a report by INSA, the Iranian Students News Agency, a group of parliamentarians visited the university today, taking testimony from students who witnessed the previous night’s events.
After their trip to the campus the group made a statement calling “for the damages [to dormitory buildings] to be repaired … arrested students to be released and those who carried out [these] unfortunate events to be arrested.”
In response to the lawmakers’ call, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani constituted the group as a formal committee charged with investigating the “unfortunate incidents.”
5 pm update: Larijani is a longtime rival of Ahmadinejad, but he conspicuously congratulated the president on his re-election over the weekend. His appointment of this committee may suggest that he believes the political winds are shifting.
10 pm update: The Guardian (UK) says it has received an unconfirmed report that five Tehran University students died in the dorm assault. It names the five students, and reports that they are believed to have been buried today. The Guardian also reports that seven people involved in a student protest are said to have been killed by riot police in Shiraz, and that students at Isfahan University may have been thrown from upper-story windows.
11 pm update: According to this site, two of the five students killed were women. The female students who were said to have died were Mobina Ehterami and Fatemeh Barati, and the men were Kasra Sharafi, Kambiz Shoaei, and Mohsen Imani.
Reports have been bubbling up on Twitter of a major government raid on dormitories at Tehran University last night. Photos and video posted online show destroyed doors, ransacked rooms, and students displaying their injuries.
Now the Guardian, a major UK newspaper, has posted an eyewitness report on last night’s events online:
The protests at a university in Tehran were bigger than on Saturday night. Students gathered in front of the dormitory, and they were throwing stones at bricks at the riot police and basijis [militiamen] who had attacked them with teargas.
At 1.30am riot police opened fire with teargas. We could hear the shots every minute. Three protestors were hit – one in the leg, one in his eye, and one in his neck – and then six more were hit, but nobody was allowed to go and help them.
They were screaming and the student who was hit in the eye was in a terrible condition, but the police didn’t let anyone help them. Then the police went into the dormitory complex.
They took over block number 23 and severely attacked the students there with plastic batons. The police set fire to the student’s belongings and their beds. Then special guards from the army entered the dorms carrying rifles.
At least 300 special guards and riot police on motorbikes joined the ones in the dorms, and they were firing more teargas. I was in dorm number 22 when they broke down the doors and entered the building, firing at least 10 teargas rounds.
We had nowhere to hide but the toilets and bathrooms, and they shouted “You traitors to the Islamic republic, you bastards, leave the building or we’ll shoot you all.” Many students were severely wounded in the attack – we could hear injured students groaning and shouting for help.
At 3am the special guards and riot police said on loudspeakers: “If you evacuate the building we won’t harm you. Otherwise you’ll all be injured or killed.”
Then all the students came out of the building in lines, with their hands on their heads. The police hit then with batons and some started to shout that they had conquered the dorms. Eventually they let us go back to our rooms, but at least ten had been shot, some appeared to have been killed, and hundreds were injured.
10 am update: Reuters reports that four hundred Tehran University students have staged a protest at a mosque on campus this morning, announcing plans for a sit-in tomorrow. One says more than a hundred students were arrested in last night’s militia assault on the dorms.
1:45 pm update: Many more photos of destruction of dorm rooms. Lots of broken doors, shattered glass, fire damage.
10 pm update: A report claims five students were killed in the dorm assault. A committee of the Iranian parliament will be conducting an investigation of the incident.
The Providence, Rhode Island mayor’s proposal to slap a “student municipal impact fee” on the city’s college students is being introduced as legislation in the RI state legislature.
The student tax, which I discussed here last month, would be an assessment of $150 per semester for all undergraduate and graduate students at the city’s four private universities. It’s intended to help close a multi million dollar municipal budget deficit.
Mayor Cicilline also put forward an alternate funding mechanism — a bill that would allow the city to collect fees directly from its largest tax-exempt institutions (the four universities plus five private hospitals). That bill would permit the assessment of such fees up to twenty-five percent of the taxes that the institutions would pay if they were not exempt.
studentactivism.net 
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