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NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?
Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.
This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 🧵 https://t.co/cBAgrLWKi5
Like everything @jburnmurdoch makes, this chart is amazing.
The sharp decline in conscientiousness and rise in neuroticism among young people is astonishing.
But also of note: literally every age group has gotten less extroverted in the age of the smartphone https://t.co/C4QrZlRjwM
Christ this data is so grim:
"The troubling decline in conscientiousness. A critical life skill is fading out — and especially fast among young adults." https://t.co/gOKhcpzAaB
The rise in teen depression coincides with the proliferation of smartphones and social media. “It’s very suspicious that teen anxiety and depression really started to take off around 2012, because that’s when 50 percent of Americans owned a smartphone, when social media went from optional to virtually mandatory, and when smartphones got... See more
Derek Thompson • Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out
Jean Twenge argues that technological change is the largest single driver of generational differences, in her book, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future. Putnam and Twenge both point to the “individualizing” or “atomizing” effect of new technologies of... See more
Zach Rausch • The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was a Major Driver of the Loss of the Play-Based Childhood
My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.
Jonathan Haidt • The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
A Theory of Dumb
nymag.com
