Co-written by Jim A. McCleskey at Western Governors University and Houston Community College.

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.

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........

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