Social Values and Moral Intuitions

The World-Views of "Millennial" Young Adults

Gary S. Gregg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351757584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Millennials have been stereotyped as both "entitled slackers" and "the next greatest generation." This study uses depth interviews to offer a scholarly and balanced account of young adults' values and world-views. It investigates their views on a wide range of issues, including religion, the economy, politics, gender, ethnicity, and the digital technologies they've grown up with. Based on the findings, it revises current theories about the psychological underpinnings of beliefs, especially about the "moral intuitions" that guide Millennials' thinking. Examining the values they share and the distinctive views of individuals, this fascinating work will interest researchers and students in psychology and related social sciences.

1

Studying Millennials’ Social Values

This chapter provides the conceptual framework for our study. We briefly review theories of psychological development in early or “emerging” adulthood and the “componential” theories of belief systems we seek to evaluate. Then we describe the design of our Study of Social Values and the methods we used to conduct and analyze our interviews, focus groups, and cyber-memoirs. And, to prepare for the presentation of our findings, we end with a summary of what survey studies have found about Millennials’ beliefs and attitudes.

Young Adult Development

For several decades Erik Erikson (1950, 1968) has been the most influential theorist of development in adolescence and early adulthood. He argued that the development of a “psycho-social identity” in late adolescence is a critical developmental task that often sets a young adult’s trajectory through the rest of life. In his view, three changes in the early teen years combine to disequilibrate childhood personality organization: the growth of a body with adult strength and sexuality; the entry into new social roles that have more adult-like opportunities and responsibilities; and the acquisition of what Jean Piaget termed formal operational thought, which enables teens to compare systems of ideas and world-views. Where children’s personalities tend to be anchored by identifications with parents and “role models” and by dis-identifications with negative figures, these disequilibrating transitions require young adults to form an identity that anchors their adult personality in a system of beliefs and values, and in representations of their position(s) and future roles in society. Identifications with admired figures and dis-identifications with disliked figures remain important, but now as symbols of abstract systems of beliefs and values.

For Erikson, then, identity consists of a commitment to a system of values and a corresponding lifestyle that locates a person in a set of roles and statuses in the social order, and that traces a trajectory through the life cycle within one’s society. To phrase this differently, an identity can be said to entail a commitment to a world-view: to a representation of the social and spiritual order and to a meaningful life lived within it. A young adult can “consolidate” a coherent identity with a relatively rudimentary sketch of his/her values: the details need not be filled in; many elements may have a provisional quality; ambivalence and contradiction may remain. Erikson emphasized that everyone’s personality encompasses an array of motives, anxieties, identifications, and even sub-personalities, that an identity more or less successfully integrates. Recent theories of identity recognize that most people have several personas or self-representations among which they shift, integrated by an overarching life story (McAdams, 1988, 1995), by a pattern of dialogue among the self’s multiple “voices” (Hermans and Kempen, 1991; Hermans, 2001), or by “key” self-symbols and metaphors that “generate” contrasting self-representations (Gregg, 1991, 2007, 2012). The integration and coherence of an identity therefore need not entail a high degree of consistency among a person’s views and values; a coherent identity may allow a person to express different “sides” of his/her character. We designed our study less to assess the logical consistency of our respondents’ attitudes than to investigate the psychological coherence of their values, as they form a central feature of their identities.

Writing in the early 1950s, when many people really did settle down in their late teens or early twenties, Erikson believed that as young adults consolidated identities they progressed to the sixth of his eight developmental tasks: forming long-term intimate relationships with romantic partners and with people in their vocations and communities. In the 2000s, however, many young people do not settle down until their late twenties or even early thirties, and Jeffery Arnett (2004) has proposed a significant revision to Erikson’s theory. Based on an array of U.S. and cross-cultural data, and on his own interviews with hundreds of twenty-something Americans, Arnett argues that a new developmental stage of “emerging adulthood” has appeared. He believes that, for emerging adults, the twenties has become a period of extended identity exploration: of lengthened preparation for a career or of itinerant job experiences, of frequent moves, of lifestyle experimentation, and of not fully committed romantic relationships. Arnett is careful to point out that this “stage” is not a natural feature of the human lifespan but a relatively recent creation of modern societies, and especially of their middle- and upper-class sectors, which now typically require college and some graduate education, and in which young men and women increasingly defer marriage until they are established in their careers. He believes this stage is beginning to appear in the urban-advantaged sectors of many developing societies, but is rarely found in their more traditional sectors.

A decade of studies has found that religious values, interpersonal styles, career interests and skills, and personal identity continue to develop through the twenties (for reviews, see Arnett and Tanner, 2006; Schwartz et al., 2013; Barry and Abo-Zena, 2015) and tend not to be “resolved” at the end of adolescence. Jennifer Tanner (2006) theorizes that emerging adults go through a process of psychological recentering in all these areas, which entails a second separation/individuation process and ego development from familial to self-regulation. Many studies have found that those who achieve more well-defined and coherent identities in this period tend to have higher self-esteem, lower anxiety, and depression, engage in less risky behavior, and report stronger senses of meaningfulness (for a review, see Schwartz et al., 2013), as also do those who develop stronger religious or spiritual beliefs (see Barry and Abo-Zena, 2014).

In spite of the fact that some forms of psychopathology increase in the late teens and early twenties (Schulenberg and Zarrett, 2006), Arnett’s studies have found evidence that psychological well-being generally increases during emerging adulthood, and he conveys a mostly positive view of the period. Perhaps because of this, his theory has provoked a good deal of debate, much of it over the extent to which young adults are choosing to prolong their identity exploration, or are finding it increasingly difficult to settle into jobs, marriages, and communities because of economic and other societal changes. In Arrested Adulthood, James Côté (2000) argues that, because of a societal “destructuring” of the transition into adulthood, more and more youths find themselves “left in a limbo,” wallowing “in forms of immaturity characterized by partially formed ideals, identities, and skills” (p. 31). His research finds that more advantaged youths (in terms of both family status and personality characteristics) do tend to benefit from prolonged moratoriums, but that less advantaged youths do not (Côté, 2006). Leo Hendry and Marion Kloep (2007a, 2007b) similarly argue that, for the working-class youths they studied, the twenties are not a period of emerging adulthood but of “prevented adulthood” and “unhappy stagnation” (p. 77). They believe it is mainly more affluent youths who are “taking their time to explore their identities and delaying adult responsibilities” (2011, p. 88), and they argue that this represents an increasingly prevalent “lifestyle” rather than a new developmental stage.

In another important line of research, Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell (2009) have made innovative use of a variety of data sources to show a steady and rather dramatic increase in “narcissism” from the late 1970s to the 2000s – hence the title of Twenge’s (2006) book on Millennials, Generation Me. Their best source were studies that had administered the 40-question Narcissistic Personality Inventory (“NPI scale”) to nearly 50,000 college students between 1979 and 2008: their analyses found that scores on this scale have increased over 30 percent. Along with an array of other data – such as a rise in academic publications, news stories, and books on self-esteem and narcissism, more people electing cosmetic surgery, etc. – they make a strong case that “narcissism” has increased significantly over the last 30 years.¹

It is important to note that the “narcissism” measured by the NPI scale is not “narcissistic personality disorder,” as this is conceptualized as a clinical syndrome, often characterized by sharp swings between self-denigration and grandiosity and frequently involving extreme introversion and chronic depression. Rather, the scale measures a tendency toward extraversion, self-admiration, and often unreasonably high self-esteem – and we think it best can be thought of as “self-centeredness.” Arnett does not describe emerging adults as “narcissistic,” and he recently criticized Twenge’s interpretations (Arnett, Trzesniewski, and Donnellan, 2013) and argued that emerging adults are more socially oriented toward “We” than narcissistically toward “Me.”² But he still emphasizes how highly “individualistic” and “self-focused” – as opposed to “collectivistic” – they are in ways that parallel Twenge’s account. Despite their disagreements, these lines of research converge to suggest that twenty-somethings increasingly live in a stage of “emerging adulthood,” which often means with provisional jobs, relationships, and identities, and with outlooks correspondingly high in individualism that may be “narcissistic” or at least “self-centered.” Arnett appears to believe that young people mostly are choosing to delay commitments and extend their “identity exploration,” while Côté (2000) and Hendry and Kloep (2007a, 2007b, 2011) believe that a great many are finding their transition to adulthood unwillingly delayed.

We did not design our study to resolve these debates. For one thing, our respondents were 18 to 24, and we did not study people in their mid- to late twenties, who figure prominently in Arnett’s theory of emerging adulthood. For another, we did not attempt to measure narcissism, empathy, or trust. Nonetheless, our interviews generally support Arnett’s notion that most of those in their late teens and early twenties are experiencing a “stage” of emerging adulthood, with most of the features he describes. And our focus on Millennials’ social values – rooted in their life structures and anchoring their identities – gives us an additional perspective that allows us to at least weigh in on the debates. As we will see, our interviews suggest that more advantaged young adults are likely to deliberately postpone settling to take advantage of new employment and relationship norms, while less advantaged young adults are likely to find themselves in “unhappy stagnation.”

To summarize: we designed our study to go beyond what large-scale surveys tell us about Millennials, and to complement recent research on emerging adulthood, by investigating respondents’ social values and world-views as central elements of their identities.

“Componential” Theories of Belief Systems

The notion that religious beliefs and social values express underlying emotional orientations – and not primarily rational deliberation or mindless conformity to prevailing norms – dates back to the beginnings of psychology. In the early twentieth century William James (1958 [1902]) studied “the varieties of religious experience” and theorized that there are two main types of religiosity that derive from underlying personality styles: the more measured, tolerant, and compassionate faiths of the “healthy minded” and the more passionate, rigid, and “fire-and-brimstone” beliefs of the “sick soul,” which often entail a “second birth” conversion. Sigmund Freud (1964 [1927]) famously theorized that religion serves as a defense against anxieties and immoral or antisocial wishes, with gods, prophets, and other religious figures representing comforting or punitive parent figures. An especially important theory of the influence of emotions on political views came from the Frankfurt School scholars’ analysis of Nazism in the late 1920s and 1930s (Fromm, 1984; Adorno et al., 1950). They theorized that an authoritarian personality syndrome – present in varying strengths in a significant percentage of the populace – inclines people to defensively yearn for a secure place in a hierarchy of authority, and to psychologically project their own antisocial wishes and abject self-images onto out-group scapegoats (mainly Jews in Germany), onto whom they then displace hostility that originally was directed at their parents, teachers, and other in-group authorities. This theory explains the strong link between the desire for families, institutions, and society to be organized as hierarchies of authority and the adoption of prejudicial attitudes toward ethnic minorities, women, and sexual and social “deviants,” which six decades of research – recently by Bob Altemeyer (1996) – has confirmed.

This can be regarded as an early “componential” theory, because it held that the personality syndrome inclines some people to find fascist-like ideologies emotionally appealing. Further, psychological authoritarianism was hypothesized to often lie dormant “beneath” tolerant and pro-democratic attitudes that may be taught in school and/or supported by one’s social group, until activated by social or moral crises – a view for which Karen Stenner (2005) recently provided impressive evidence. In addition, the theory held that many individuals develop a mixture of authoritarian and open emotional styles – in other words, both underlying “components” – and respond ambivalently to democratic-tolerant and authoritarian-ethnocentric visions of the social order.

As mentioned in the Introduction, psychologists’ interest in studying belief systems waned as the experience of World War II receded, but it has revived in the last two decades of culture wars, ethnic cleansings, and fundamentalisms, and there are now several important componential theories. Bob Altemeyer (1996) has renewed studies of authoritarianism, and Jim Sidanius and his colleagues (2004) have identified a separate personality syndrome they term social dominance orientation (SDO) that also tends to be associated with conservative and ethnocentric attitudes, but centers not on moral chaos versus order but on the belief that we live in an amoral, Machiavellian dog-eat-dog world in which it is necessary to struggle for social position and status. Another important theory comes from Sylvan Tomkins (1995), who was a pioneer in studying affect (emotion) and its communication by facial expressions. He theorized that people are drawn toward conservative versus liberal social views by their underlying ideo-affective postures. People who are especially prone to feeling disgust and contempt tend to develop normative values that emphasize the order that hierarchy and clearly defined social boundaries provide, and so they easily “resonate” to conservative views. By contrast, those strongly inclined to feel empathy and compassion tend to develop humanist values that emphasize tolerance, cooperation among equals, and help for the disadvantaged, and so they usually “resonate” to liberal views. Tomkins believed that many individuals have both ideo-affective components in varying strengths, so they may ambivalently “resonate” to both conservative and liberal rhetoric. But he usually spoke of normative and humanist orientations as if they formed an either-or continuum (de St. Aubin, 1996; Stone and Schaffner, 1997).

Sociolinguist George Lakoff (1996, 2008) has studied American political rhetoric, and theorizes that (1) the social order often is conceived metaphorically as resembling a family, and (2) there are two main models of family relations that underlie the prevailing conservative–liberal political culture. A “strict father” model holds that fathers should take the lead in raising children, with clear moral rules and discipline that will build self-control and prepare them to hold their own and achieve in a competitive world. By contrast, a “nurturant parent” model holds that both parents should nurture the development of children’s talents and foster their capacities for empathy and cooperation, to prepare them to live in an egalitarian and collaborative world. Conservative politicians tend to speak about issues by evoking “strict father” family metaphors that emphasize strength, self-discipline, moral certainties, and competition, while liberals draw on “nurturant parent” metaphors that emphasize government protection of citizens, help for the disadvantaged, tolerance, and cooperation. Lakoff also recognizes that many people internalize both models, and so may be “biconceptual,” or “frame-shift” between them.

In a different approach, anthropologist Richard Shweder and his colleagues (1997) studied moral reasoning among Hindu Indians and identified three core ethics: autonomy, community, and divinity. Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and their colleagues (1999) further studied these ethics and their underlying social emotions in the United States and Japan. They believe that individuals and cultures differ in which of these ethics they most emphasize and how they combine them. Haidt and his colleagues (2004, 2007, 2012) have developed perhaps the most sophisticated componential theory, proposing that there are five (recently increased to six) moral intuitions that underlie people’s social views. Haidt reasons that each of these derives...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The “Millennial” Generation
• 1 Studying Millennials’ Social Values
• 2 Millennials’ Values and World-Views
• 3 Individuals’ Belief Systems
• 4 Millennials View American Society
• 5 Millennials View the World
• 6 Social Philosophies and the Great Recession
• 7 Millennials View Their Cyber-Virtual Worlds
• 8 Social Class: The World-Views of “Non-College” Millennials
• 9 A Theory of Social Values
• Appendix 1: Respondents
• Appendix 2: The Kids Are Not All Right: Social and Psychological Distress among the “Millennial” Generation
• References
• Index