There is almost a deafening discussion going on about the self-centeredness of today’s young adults. Weather you call them Generation Y, millennials or twenty-somethings, the general refrain seems to be a perception that the entire lot of them only care about themselves.
Patricia Greenfield of the University of California in Los Angeles actually used the Google Ngram Viewer to study this perception. Her findings, published in Psychological Science, showed that there has indeed been a distinct rise in more individualistic words such as “choose,” “get,” “feel,” “unique,” “individual” and “self” and a decrease in community-focused words such as “obliged,” “give,” “act,” “obedience,” “authority,” “pray” and “belong.”