Changes in Need for Uniqueness From 2000 Until 2020(online.ucpress.edu)
online.ucpress.edu
Changes in Need for Uniqueness From 2000 Until 2020
https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/10/1/121937/202992/Changes-in-Need-for-Uniqueness-From-2000-Until
24 comments
And it really wasn't even the town or city. It was maybe your school and inside that your cohort. Maybe a couple hundred people. Find 3-5 like minded individuals and compared to everyone else you were unique enough.
On the other hand, it is nice to know that there are other people who share your predilections.
Though it's less nice when the ideas one share are idiotic hate filled rancor.
I’m pretty sure that those sharing such things don’t find it any less nice.
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One man's terrorist is one man's freedom fighter. There is a benefit to people openly associating. One may not agree, but it is, frankly, preferable to the those ideas simmering beneath the surface without any kinda way to measure how fast they are spreading ( and why ). Honestly, pretending things don't exist does not work that well for too long.
I agree with this comment, but at the same time I am troubled by the spread of deliberate falsehoods - things that the speaker knows are not true, done to further their own agenda.
Could it be that a larger more representative portion of the general population has gone online since 2000?
Maybe a little earlier on in the history of the internet, it was a somewhat more individualistic and dare I suggest more educated and intelligent sample of people?
Whereas at this point, it's every idiot, their grandma, and their dog.
Or just a larger group, which becomes a mob. No one wants to be attacked by a mob. People learn that they will just have their comment buried and receive hate or disrespect if they write it in the wrong website, group or thread.
Actually, I think that sometimes the better my comment is in terms of actual truth or making fair points, the less likely it is to receive points or positive comments . Because to do that I will try to be a little subtle and look at both sides of an issue. So the comment can have something that both groups (who are often quite polarized) dislike in it. And will be longer. The average internet user today resents it when you make them read more than a few sentences at a time.
Maybe a little earlier on in the history of the internet, it was a somewhat more individualistic and dare I suggest more educated and intelligent sample of people?
Whereas at this point, it's every idiot, their grandma, and their dog.
Or just a larger group, which becomes a mob. No one wants to be attacked by a mob. People learn that they will just have their comment buried and receive hate or disrespect if they write it in the wrong website, group or thread.
Actually, I think that sometimes the better my comment is in terms of actual truth or making fair points, the less likely it is to receive points or positive comments . Because to do that I will try to be a little subtle and look at both sides of an issue. So the comment can have something that both groups (who are often quite polarized) dislike in it. And will be longer. The average internet user today resents it when you make them read more than a few sentences at a time.
VC Mike Maples of Floodgate recently wrote a new book on a tangential topic. The founders of the best companies he's invested in (Twitch, Lyft, Twitter) don't mind being perceived as outsiders. They're confidently living in some future state that the rest of the world hasn't caught up to yet. He calls this quality "disagreeableness", but it could also be described as a comfort with being unique. If a desire for that quality is decreasing, does it make it harder or easier to bring innovative new ideas to market?
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-find-a-great-start...
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-find-a-great-start...
Agreeableness and disagreeableness are terms from the "Big 5" psychology theories.
Both sides have pros and cons, and disagreeableness can be very useful for breaking out of conformist traps.
Both sides have pros and cons, and disagreeableness can be very useful for breaking out of conformist traps.
Was ready to be super sceptical but this is interesting. The measure gets at ways of showing uniqueness (e.g. defending a view thats different from everyone else's, not caring what others think). So I can buy that has descreased.
What I bet hasn't decreased is the extent to which people say they want to be unique.
What I bet hasn't decreased is the extent to which people say they want to be unique.
Well it may also be the difference between needing to express uniqueness as a mechanism to display it to others. If I'm secure that I'm a unique individual, I may not need to express it or demonstrate it.
If you really are different and not understood, say you have
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disord...
(which I don't think is quite the right construct for what it describes but they had to run the politics of the DSM to get something in there) you might
(1) think you are unique when you have a condition that maybe 3-5% of people have, (2) try as hard as you can to "mask" your condition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disord...
(which I don't think is quite the right construct for what it describes but they had to run the politics of the DSM to get something in there) you might
(1) think you are unique when you have a condition that maybe 3-5% of people have, (2) try as hard as you can to "mask" your condition
God, my daughter says she “just wants to be normal.” Hard for me to understand. Can’t tell if it’s TikTok, living in the Netherlands or the happily weird father figure.
> What I bet hasn't decreased is the extent to which people say they want to be unique.
FTA:
> In our study of over one million participants surveyed from 2000 to 2020, we found that need for uniqueness was lowest among participants who took the survey most recently in 2020 compared to those in 2000.
So it seems that the desire for uniqueness has decreased, unless I'm reading this incorrectly. That's a surprise to me just based on my observations and possible biases.
FTA:
> In our study of over one million participants surveyed from 2000 to 2020, we found that need for uniqueness was lowest among participants who took the survey most recently in 2020 compared to those in 2000.
So it seems that the desire for uniqueness has decreased, unless I'm reading this incorrectly. That's a surprise to me just based on my observations and possible biases.
The desire to be unique tends to decrease with age as a person's self identity starts to settle in.
As the population increases, there's more people in the identity-building phase of life at one time than ever before. So while the individual desire does decrease, I believe you are right that the overall desire globally has not.
As the population increases, there's more people in the identity-building phase of life at one time than ever before. So while the individual desire does decrease, I believe you are right that the overall desire globally has not.
Hard to detangle fake-uniqueness from real-uniqueness :: especially when the discussion turns to social appearances and how we want to describe ourselves.
Young friends calling themselves "weird" because they dress alternative. They lack the decades to see that emo/goth/alt identity is belonging to a group. Piercings and recreational drugs!
Or wealthy kid doing an extreme sport. Tryharding to be unique is completely normal in many scenes.
Many people seem to define their identity as being NOT something :: join the struggle against normality. As a boring straight guy, LGBTQIA+ sometimes appears to simply mean NOT heteronormal to me.
The word alternative also contains that concept.
(Reedited to tidy)
Young friends calling themselves "weird" because they dress alternative. They lack the decades to see that emo/goth/alt identity is belonging to a group. Piercings and recreational drugs!
Or wealthy kid doing an extreme sport. Tryharding to be unique is completely normal in many scenes.
Many people seem to define their identity as being NOT something :: join the struggle against normality. As a boring straight guy, LGBTQIA+ sometimes appears to simply mean NOT heteronormal to me.
The word alternative also contains that concept.
(Reedited to tidy)
Well yeah, LGBTQIA+ sort of explicitly excludes heteronormals definitionally, but I think very few individuals identify as all of those.
Did they really not control for race? I didn't close read but I can't fathom not controlling for race/nationality, which I'd suspect is correlated with need for uniqueness.
It's an online survey. This data is as unrepresentative and unreliable as they come, and the effects are small. This study is one to ignore.
With 1.3 million samples showing fairly clean/consistent trends, something seems to be reliably happening, sustained over 20 years. And effect sizes on the order of 1/3 of a standard deviation seem not that small: an average score in 2000 would be somewhere around the 60th percentile if you got it today, right?
They did include demographic questions between 2004 and 2009, which seemed to line up with other results out of that lab [0] indicating that massive online panels like this are reasonably representative, if skewed female. As nice as it would have been if they’d looked more formally, there seems not to be much indication that the demographic composition of their respondents changed all that much over that time.
Even if these results only describe “the population of online people who do personality tests for fun,” don’t they still reflect something reliably changing about that population?
And whatever we wish had been done differently in this study, isn’t it appropriate to interpret it as at least a flawed piece of evidence against the entire landscape of clues pointing toward a rise in social anxiety over that time?
[0] Sam Gosling, whose project collected these data, wrote the book about massive online panels: https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4311014 . The project this data came from started off with research addressing whether it was representative enough to be useful https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/0003-066X.59.... . Lord knows lessons have been learned since then, but I’m not sure it’s fair to imply that serious people didn’t think seriously about the questions we’re raising here.
They did include demographic questions between 2004 and 2009, which seemed to line up with other results out of that lab [0] indicating that massive online panels like this are reasonably representative, if skewed female. As nice as it would have been if they’d looked more formally, there seems not to be much indication that the demographic composition of their respondents changed all that much over that time.
Even if these results only describe “the population of online people who do personality tests for fun,” don’t they still reflect something reliably changing about that population?
And whatever we wish had been done differently in this study, isn’t it appropriate to interpret it as at least a flawed piece of evidence against the entire landscape of clues pointing toward a rise in social anxiety over that time?
[0] Sam Gosling, whose project collected these data, wrote the book about massive online panels: https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4311014 . The project this data came from started off with research addressing whether it was representative enough to be useful https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/0003-066X.59.... . Lord knows lessons have been learned since then, but I’m not sure it’s fair to imply that serious people didn’t think seriously about the questions we’re raising here.
> something
That's the keyword. Something, not "need for uniqueness."
The change can be anything, e.g. a change in the respondent population, or a trend from desktop to mobile (which has been reported to have an effect on how people answer scale questions). E.g., if you look at the graphs, there's an increase in standard deviation over time, and a pretty big one too. Where does that come from? You can't just say "hey, I have a post-hoc hypothesis, some very noisy data, and some correlation fits, so I must be right."
> isn’t it appropriate to interpret it as at least a flawed piece of evidence against ... a rise in social anxiety
In what way? First, need for uniqueness and social anxiety are two different things. Second, the need for uniqueness may have risen, while other trends are pushing the line downwards. And third, the relation between the questionnaire and need for uniqueness is tentative, to say the least. One of the questions they included is “It is better to always agree with the opinion of others than to be considered a disagreeable person.” It's all hand waving.
So no, I can't agree, and it would be unethical to draw any real-life conclusions from such an article.
> I’m not sure it’s fair to imply that serious people didn’t think seriously
It is naive to think they found a solution for that, and forgot to mention it in the article. The fact that demographic data wasn't available for 3/4 of the respondents should give that thought a pause.
Academics don't work for the truth, but for publications and citations. It's the main reason so many studies in psychology are simply false.
That's the keyword. Something, not "need for uniqueness."
The change can be anything, e.g. a change in the respondent population, or a trend from desktop to mobile (which has been reported to have an effect on how people answer scale questions). E.g., if you look at the graphs, there's an increase in standard deviation over time, and a pretty big one too. Where does that come from? You can't just say "hey, I have a post-hoc hypothesis, some very noisy data, and some correlation fits, so I must be right."
> isn’t it appropriate to interpret it as at least a flawed piece of evidence against ... a rise in social anxiety
In what way? First, need for uniqueness and social anxiety are two different things. Second, the need for uniqueness may have risen, while other trends are pushing the line downwards. And third, the relation between the questionnaire and need for uniqueness is tentative, to say the least. One of the questions they included is “It is better to always agree with the opinion of others than to be considered a disagreeable person.” It's all hand waving.
So no, I can't agree, and it would be unethical to draw any real-life conclusions from such an article.
> I’m not sure it’s fair to imply that serious people didn’t think seriously
It is naive to think they found a solution for that, and forgot to mention it in the article. The fact that demographic data wasn't available for 3/4 of the respondents should give that thought a pause.
Academics don't work for the truth, but for publications and citations. It's the main reason so many studies in psychology are simply false.
When your point of reference is a town of a few tens of thousands of people, you can be unique without doing anything too outlandish. Slightly different tastes in clothes, music, sports and attitudes to your friends and you're most of the way there already.
But when social media changes your point of comparison to basically the whole population of the world? Well, turns out I'm not that unique after all.