[HN Gopher] Changes in Need for Uniqueness From 2000 Until 2020
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Changes in Need for Uniqueness From 2000 Until 2020
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 35 points
Date : 2024-08-27 14:18 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (online.ucpress.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (online.ucpress.edu)
| pressentiment wrote:
| 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.
| da_chicken wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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.
| mcbutterbunz wrote:
| > 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| I'd say the meaning of "uniqueness" has changed quite a lot with
| the rise of the internet and social media.
|
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| On the other hand, it is nice to know that there are other
| people who share your predilections.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Though it's less nice when the ideas one share are idiotic
| hate filled rancor.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| 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.
| fn-mote wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that those sharing such things don't find
| it any less nice.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| greentxt wrote:
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| 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.
| alwa wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| 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)
| c22 wrote:
| Well yeah, LGBTQIA+ sort of explicitly excludes heteronormals
| definitionally, but I think very few individuals identify as
| _all_ of those.
| elawler24 wrote:
| 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...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| 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.
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