Generation Tosh

Generational categories – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z – are based on the notion that those born within narrow 15-year periods display characteristic behaviour that distinguishes them from those born in years earlier or later.  For example, people born between 1965 and 1980 are supposedly ‘apathetic’, but next generation people are ‘narcissistic’.  Really? 

Like so many anecdotal attempts to categorise people the classification is arbitrary, and has little evidence to support its vague generalisations. Mark McCrindle has dubbed the current cohort (2013-2025) Generation Alpha, a name that is claimed to make sense ‘as it is in keeping with scientific nomenclature’, but switching to Greek doesn’t transform popular mythology into science.  The objection is not so much to arbitrarily creating categories for a bit of fun; the objection is pretending it’s science.        

Are people born between 1981 and 1996 more self-regarding or narcissistic?  The BBC television series ‘Age of the Image’, aired in 2020, opens with a scene of a throng gathered around Michelangelo’s Mona Lisa.  Many will have crossed continents for this opportunity, but what are they all doing?  Taking selfies.  The painting has been relegated to a backdrop for yet another image of beaming, happy me.  The crowd includes people from all age groups; the self-regarding attitude reflected in the scene is no different across supposed generations.  All that’s changed is that cell phones have become more ubiquitous.

Generational ideas have been systematically criticised, most recently and trenchantly by Philip Cohen, who describes the widespread and unquestioning acceptance of these categories as perpetuating a cultural pastiche.  He and other writers do acknowledge the fact of cultural and societal change over time, but tracking it on the basis of misleading categories hinders a proper understanding of complex, reciprocal links between behavioural changes amongst individuals on the one hand, and broad social or technological trends in society on the other.   

Technological innovation usually brings both advantages and disadvantages – obvious examples are nuclear energy or AI.  In the same way, the convenience and immediacy of communication technology is accompanied by the sometimes personally devastating effects of false comparisons.  Presented with endless beaming selfie happiness can make any personal unhappiness seem even deeper; it can be hard to remember that the inane grinning may just be a show put on for the picture, by people who might in fact be equally unhappy.

Demonstrating the validity of ‘soft’ data is certainly problematic, as we discovered when seeking to demonstrate the effects of the Challenge of Change Resilience Training®.  The gold standard, essential in trials of new drug treatments, is the randomised controlled trial.   Our solution was to compare criterion scores for trained participants with scores for groups who had received a dummy training equivalent.  The study was based on a long inter-test interval, and we stratified the samples by factors such as age and job experience as well as controlling for variables such as mutual comparison.  Within those constraints, the training was shown to significantly reduce sickness-absence amongst the test participants compared with the controls (Roger & Hudson, 1995). 

Providing reliable evidence for generational differences is well-nigh impossible, yet references to Generation X, Z or whatever trip off the tongue as if they were real.  Individual people in any generation might well be apathetic or self-regarding, but claiming that these characteristics generalise within age-bands is intellectually irresponsible.  Unfortunately, repeated usage leads to the ‘illusory truth effect’: say something dubious often enough and it gets accepted as being true.  Just so with the generation myth.