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The World Is Going to Hell, the Young No Longer Respect Their Elders, and Other Tricks of the Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Piers Steel  and
John Kammeyer-Mueller
Piers Steel*
Affiliation:
Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary
John Kammeyer-Mueller
Affiliation:
Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Piers Steel, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Scurfield Hall, Room 444, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, CanadaT2N 1N4. E-mail: piers.steel@haskayne.ucalgary.ca
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Extract

The notion of a “Millennial” generation, much like a “Generation X” or the “Baby Boom” generation, with a strong coherence in terms of values and norms that differ from previous cohorts, has been of dependable interest in the popular press. However, given what we know regarding the proportion of trait expression due to sources largely immune to cohort effects (e.g., large genetic contributions), how difficult it is for us to systematically influence their expression (e.g., small long-term parental effects), and the massive variation within groups, the meta-analytic work of Costanza, Fraser, Badger, Severt, and Gade (2012) underscores what should already be known from first principles; generation or cohorts are inevitably a poor predictor of anything. The literature on ingroup/outgroup bias (Hogg & Abrams, 1990), stereotype formation (Mackie, Hamilton, Susskind, & Rosselli, 1996), and reconstructive memory issues (Schacter, 1999) provides ample underlying evidence for how these generational overgeneralizations form.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 366 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2015 

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