Back in the 1950s, when the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was given to teens, only 12 percent of them agreed with the statement, “I am an important person.” In the 980s, though, around 80 percent of them replied, “Yes.” The question didn’t ask about virtue or vice, talent or skill, ambition or motivation, achievement or failure. The issue was importance, and somehow the importance factor jumped more than 600 percent in 30 years. (See the work of Cassandra Newsom, and also a recent book entitled Fame Junkies, by Jake Halpern.)

Recent studies raise the self-importance factor even higher. Social scientists Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and many others have studied various personality inventories and come to a stark conclusion: “American college students score progressively higher on narcissism between the early 1980s and 2006.” That’s the conclusion of a paper in the Journal of Personality (August 2008) entitled “Egos Inflating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory,” by Twenge, Campbell, Sara Konrath, Joshua Foster, and Brad J. Bushman. They attribute the rise mainly to school programs and educational media that highlight “positive self-feelings and specialness.” They include grade inflation in the trend.

Additionally, they wonder about whether new technologies aggravate the problem. “Devices such as iPods and Tivo allow people to listen to music and watch television in their own individual ways,” they write, “and Web sites such as MySpace and YouTube (whose slogan is ‘Broadcast yourself’) permit self-promotion far beyond that allowed by traditional media.”

Yes, just think of the temptation of personal profiling to 17-year-olds. Their egos are fragile, their identities uncertain. Sometimes they think everybody is looking at them and thinking about them, and other times they think nobody cares about them at all. The attention of peers is crucial, shunning by them a long-remembered mortification. The things that happen in their lives, however trivial, hit them hard, and they don’t know where they will end up at age 25.

What a temptation the MySpace page and blog diary pose. To think that you can record the events of the day and week and have someone read and respond, to believe that what happens to you on the way to school might be meaningful to others, to realize that your life is, indeed, something special and different and unique and worth sharing . . . well, the new tools are the answer.

It’s natural for 17-year-olds to be and think this way, but maturity means outgrowing it, not indulging it. Let’s face it, 90-plus percent of the things that happen to you during the week are of little or no significance to anyone else. They don’t merit a blog post. Realizing that sad fact is part of growing up. It’s not a pleasant process, to be sure, and the new tools, Twitter and the rest, enable the young to delay it long past its proper moment.

Keep that in mind when students walk into your office and can’t understand why their opinion isn’t just as valid as anyone else’s.

(Photo by Flickr user MeFind)