Why Can’t the Generations Be Friends? |
There is a tendency to label other generations in negative and stereotyped ways, known as “generationalism.”
Research testing actual generational attitudes among U.S. adults tested whether these stereotypes hold up.
Not only is it possible, but it's likely, that all age groups can relate to each other as people, not labels.
From expressions such as “snowflake” to describe Millennials to the infamous “OK, Boomer,” it seems that all the media covers are the kinds of stereotypes that feed into intergenerational warfare. However, when you think about the relationships you have with people of older and younger generations, how likely are you to label people according to these mass-produced negative images?
The Idea Behind Generationalism
In a 2024 paper, Skidmore College sociologist Andrew Lindner explores the prevalence of negative “generationalism,” a “systematic appeal” to the idea of generational differences. Labels to describe generations can be traced to the first use of the term “Baby Boom” to describe the post-World War II burst in fertility rates. However, these became expanded by Strauss and Howe (1992), whose “dubious pop psychology theory,” says Lindner, involves a set of four generational archetypes that repeat cyclically and will do so indefinitely. “Never mind,” says Lindner, that “their theory has no social scientific basis whatsoever,” but it also contains the improbable assumption that everyone born in a 20-25 year period has the same qualities, along with the “disturbingly cocksure level of historical inevitability."
Clearly, Lindner is not a fan of this portrayal of wide swaths of the population based on birth year alone. The only credit he ascribes to Strauss and Howe, somewhat dubiously, is that they came up with the term “millennial” to describe people who would turn 18 in the year 2000.
With all the generational name-calling that has only intensified in the media since the time of that publication, though, is there indeed any basis for proposing that generations are doomed to continue their lengthy diatribes? To find out, Lindner investigated the extent of generationalism, its relationship to political attitudes, and the sensitivity of generational biases to experimental priming.
Documenting Generationalism’s Prevalence
The main outcome measures in Lindner’s study were so-called “feeling thermometers,” which ask participants to rate their favorability, on a 100-point scale, of target groups which, in this case, were the four generations of Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z. The experimental priming procedure asked the survey participants to complete the thermometer task after reading the prompt to think about a generation they like (positive prime), a generation they dislike (negative prime), or a control.
Overall, among the 1,200 participants, there were clear signs of an ingroup bias, meaning that each generation liked its own generation better than it liked others. Gen X was the most well-liked overall. Those born in the 1980s and 1990s were more negative toward Boomers, and those born in the 1990s were more negative toward Gen Xers. In turn, GenXers were more negative toward Millennials, and Boomers were more negative toward Gen Z. In other words, there was plenty of negativity to go around.
Even so, the author considered these negative attitudes to be relatively inconsistent when all feeling thermometer scores were taken into account. Priming also had only a modest and inconsistent impact on generational attitudes, as did another measure of political liberalism-conservatism.
The big story was that, in general, people tended to be more positive toward their generational in-group, especially the Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers. These positive ingroup biases reflect, Lindner believes, a shared sense of identity developed through shared historical experiences. In his words, “Shared memories of experiencing and responding to notable events can contribute to a positive in-group identity.”
Liking Your Generation Doesn’t Mean You Have to Hate the Others
All told, there was little support for the “playful mockery to morbid antagonism” seen in “media rhetoric and social media posts" about intergenerational mud slinging. There was some ageism and reverse ageism in attitudes toward the older and younger generations, but “the results reveal more mundane reality that many people just like their cohort peers.”
We return, then, to the question of whether generations can, or maybe are, better friends than the media acknowledges. Liking your own generation (such as it is, which also may be hard to define) does not have to translate into feeling “morbidly antagonistic” toward the others. In fact, in everyday life, people of different generations who know each other may get into spats about the great issues of the day, but so can people from the same generation.
If you think about your own intergenerational family relationships or those that exist in your workplace or among your various groups of friends, what really is going to matter the most to you in terms of your feelings of positivity or negativity? Given what Lindner regards as overly simplistic representations in the media about these four generations, it’s quite likely that it’s the person, not the year of birth, that’s going to matter the most.
This innovative study also suggests that people do define their own identities in terms of shared historical and cultural influences. And why not? Deriving part of your sense of self from the events you have lived through can help you locate yourself in time and space. Without this sense of the past, your own identity would remain shallow indeed.
To sum up, Lindner’s study shows that it’s all too easy to swallow the “massive media marketing machine” that pounds us with negative generational stereotypes. Accepting your own generation doesn’t have to mean rejecting the others who, after all, are your friends, family, neighbors, and fellow travelers through life.
Lindner, A. M. (2024). The new generationalism: Generational antagonism and partisan polarization. Sociological Forum, 39(4), 341–360. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.13017
Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. 1992. Generations. New York: Quill