"The alarm bells started ringing in earnest after a widely cited study by Twenge et al. (2008) reported increases in grandiose narcissism among U.S. college students. Media outlets ran with it. Time magazine famously labeled millennials the "Me Me Me Generation," branding them as entitled and self-obsessed. Once that story took hold, social media became the convenient villain. Platforms built on selfies, personal branding, and algorithmic validation seemed like the smoking gun. But there was a problem. The narrative relied on a specific slice of data, primarily American college students, over a particular period. When we zoom out, the 'epidemic' evaporates."
"Scroll through Instagram or TikTok for five minutes, and you will likely reach the same conclusion most pundits have: Young people are more narcissistic than ever. We are told that social media has ruined them, turning a generation of digital natives into selfie-obsessed egotists. It is a seductive narrative. It confirms our biases about "kids these days." It also happens to be wrong. Psychologists have debated the "narcissism epidemic" for nearly two decades. But newer, more robust evidence paints a very different picture. The panic isn't just exaggerated. The data contradict it."
For two decades, widespread claims linked social media to rising narcissism among young people. Early findings such as Twenge et al. (2008) relied on U.S. college samples and spurred media narratives about a "narcissism epidemic." A large 2025 investigation of 540,000 people across 55 countries found no secular increase in grandiose narcissism over the past 40 years. The data indicate that social media operates as a megaphone that amplifies existing personality traits and behaviors rather than functioning as a factory that reshapes personality across generations. Panic about a broad narcissism surge is unsupported by large-scale evidence.
Read at Psychology Today
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