Stop this "generation" label bullshit, please

Categories like Boomer, Gen X, Gen Z, Millennial, etc., are essentially meaningless.

You can find it everywhere: in the media, in business presentations, in pop-psychology talk, in a whole cottage industry of consultants who promise to teach you how to deal with the bottomless mysteries of your “Gen Z employees” or how to serve your “Boomer” clients best. There are memes. There’s more shit written about it on LinkedIn than there are grains of sand in the Universe.

There are countless infographics with the stereotypes: Generation X, “pragmatic”; Millennials, “entitled”; Gen Z, “climate-anxious, progressive on identity issues”. A recent search on The New York Times brought out literally hundreds of pieces, duly published under the masthead of the newspaper of record of Western civilization, on the purported quirks and peculiarities of the bewildering “Gen Z”.

So, one would think that these categories are well studied, properly defined, and solidly established in the scientific literature on demographics, sociology, and social psychology, right?

Well, one would be sorely disappointed. The evidence for substantial behavioral/ideological/emotional differences between the so-called “generations”, beyond the usual differences between youngsters, adults, and older people — differences that have existed, in a more or less stable form, since the first Paleolithic teenager complained their parents didn’t understand her (and the parents, that she was a good-for-nothing slacker) — is zilch. None. Zero. Nada.

A review of the relevant literature, published earlier this year, offers a very straightforward conclusion:

…there is a poor evidence base to support the assertions that there are meaningful differences between generations. However, while the evidence suggests that differences are frequently small or altogether absent, the methodological challenges mean that it is not possible to tell whether there are in fact differences. Regardless of whether there are generations such as Baby Boomers and Millennials, and regardless of whether there are real differences, many subscribe to these categories and believe in their existence. This may be supported by researchers and consultancies who endorse these constructs (…) despite the flawed nature of the evidence base.

The question, then, is why “many subscribe to these categories and believe in their existence.” I think there are five main reasons.

The first would be that the assumption that people born roughly at the same time and living through the same historical contingencies, more or less at the same age (like those who were kids during the pandemic), would bear some “mark of the times” throughout their lives. This belief has some superficial plausibility, but it takes a too broad view of events (World War II, pandemic, Cold War) and ignores how specific conditions — such as social class, family, country of birth, individual personality characteristics, etc. — filter and influence the way significant collective events will impact individual lives. Yes, everybody is marked by shared history, but each one in their own personal and particular ways.

The second reason is that labels are funny, cool, and marketable, great fodder for effective clickbait. Third, there’s a pronounced tendency — especially strong in American culture and, due to American influence, exported worldwide — to view people as easily classifiable into stereotypical categories that one can identify with no more than a cursory look (skin color, age, clothing), and to treat such categories as hard facts of nature rather than artificial, fluid concepts.

Fourth, there’s the way these generation labels glamorize and put an aura of false sophistication around things that, in truth, are run-of-the-mill and quite ordinary, such as the fact that older people with more responsibilities tend to be less risk-prone than younger, freer ones.

Last, and perhaps more important, the tendency of socially accepted stereotypes to bring a sense of belonging and identity, and to generate self-fulfilling prophecies among those who find themselves thrown into these prefabricated boxes. There’s a lot of research showing that, once people see themselves cast in groups or teams, a process of team identification, in-group solidarity, in-group conformity, and out-group friction begins, almost spontaneously. It doesn’t matter if the groups are totally arbitrary, like “blue team” and “red team”, or “those closer to the door” and “those closer to the table”.

It just happens, and the results can be pretty surprising. For instance, in the 1970s, some research was published suggesting that astrological signs could indeed predict personality characteristics: people asked to fill out personality questionnaires provided answers that were consistent with the stereotypes associated with their sun signs. Intrigued, scientists dove deeper into the data and found out that, once they controlled for the subjects’ astrological knowledge, the effect disappeared. Bottom line: people who knew what characteristics were expected of them, given astrological doctrine, would fill out their questionnaires accordingly.

So, someone may ask, even if the pop-psychology “generations” weren’t real in the beginning, didn’t conformity to stereotyping make them real now? Well, there are two problems here. One is the knowledge dependence: a “Gen-Xer” needs to know of and believe in the “Gen X” stereotype for it to have any influence on them. The other is that even this knowledgeable conformity has its limits. And again, research on astrology gives us examples.

The mythology of astrological sun signs predicts that certain signs are better suited to certain walks of life (Aries makes good soldiers and leaders, say), and that signs exist on a scale of romantic compatibility — for instance, Capricorn and Aries are, the theory goes, notoriously difficult to match with each other. Suppose astrologically knowledgeable people were truly committed to embracing their stereotypes. In that case, you’d expect to find an excess of astrology fans belonging to specific signs in specific jobs, and an excess of couples from astrologically compatible (and a dearth of incompatible) signs among the astrological cognoscenti.

But none of these predictions are supported by data. In large populations, statistically well-conducted studies systematically fail to find any astrological effects for romance or career choices. It doesn’t mean that nobody shapes their lives to fit the celestial stereotype. Perhaps some people do, but if so, they comprise a tiny minority, one that large-scale studies fail to detect.

Similarly, generation stereotypes may influence how some of the people who take them seriously behave and think some of the time (or how they describe and interpret what they do, like in the case of the astrological personality questionnaires), but not uniformly everywhere, all the time. Certainly, not enough to make these categories empirically valid or commonsensically useful. We should really throw them away and, more importantly, stop treating people who use them to sell products or advice as if they were onto something important, besides, of course, our wallets.