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Baby boomers were the real snowflakes all along.
A study published on Dec. 10 in Psychology and Aging found that although individuals tend to become less sensitive as they age, overall, millennials were less sensitive than baby boomers. It's the largest recorded study on narcissism ever conducted, Insider reports, with a study group of nearly 750 people.
Individuals with narcissistic personality disorder have an "inflated sense of self-importance" and a "sense of entitlement," according to Mayo Clinic. Other traits include arrogance and an unwillingness to "recognize the needs and feelings of others." For this study, researchers interviewed people between 13 and 77 years old about their work and personal lives.
"There's a narrative in our culture that generations are getting more and more narcissistic, but no one has ever looked at it throughout generations or how it varies with age at the same time," said lead author and associate professor of psychology William Chopik.
Chopik and his team of researchers analyzed the subjects' interviews, ranking them based on a scale from 1 to 5. The most narcissistic traits — defensiveness, authoritativeness, and stubbornness — were ranked at 5. Generally, narcissistic traits like being full of yourself, being sensitive to criticism, and imposing your opinion on others declined "over time and with age."
But when the team compared generations, the older generations tended to be more sensitive as a whole.
The study suggests that baby boomers, or "individuals who were born earlier in the [20th] century," had higher levels of hypersensitivity, or being full of themselves, and higher levels of willfulness, or the tendency to impose their opinion on others.
"There isn't much data on older generations, but now that Baby Boomers are aging into that phase of life, it's a huge part of the population that we need to be looking at," Chopik said.
He theorizes that boomers may have lived through generational events that shaped their perspective. Boomers in the United States, for example, may be more narcissistic because they grew up with government-provided privileges like social security.
Narcissistic traits tend to drop after achieving life milestones like a first job or a first relationship. Hypersensitivity sharply declined after individuals turned 40.
"One thing about narcissists is that they're not open to criticism," Chopik said. "When life happens and you're forced to accept feedback, break up with someone or have tragedy strike, you might need to adjust to understanding that you're not as awesome as you once thought."
That being said, Chopik told Insider that based on this study, "there's weak evidence that this [younger] generation is the worst in human history."
So take that, boomers.
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