The Financial Times recently told us that young people’s personalities are “in freefall.”  It’s the stuff generational bias dreams are made of.  Here are the Big Five in brief:

• Conscientiousness: Reliability, follow-through, discipline. High scorers pay bills on time and floss.
• Neuroticism: Proneness to anxiety and stress. High scorers catastrophize emails.
• Agreeableness: Cooperativeness and empathy. High scorers actually help you move a couch.
• Extraversion: Outgoing and sociable. High scorers still call instead of text.
• Openness (not even charted in the FT graph): Curiosity, imagination, creativity.

The graph is the pièce de résistance: plunging red lines showing 16–39 year-olds hemorrhaging Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Extraversion, while spiking in Neuroticism.  Read literally, it paints a perfect generational panic postcard: young people who can’t focus, won’t plan, don’t talk to each other, and are one collective panic attack away from collapse.

Ah yes — the TikTok-addled masses: can’t hold a job, ghost their friends, and melt into neurotic puddles at the first whiff of stress. If that’s the story you’re shopping for, this graph delivers.

Attention: confirmation bias, your article is calling 

The problem is these dramatic picture are almost entirely a product of data manipulation: truncated Y-axes, transformations to make the squiggles look steeper, and, in the journalist’s words, “clarifying for a general audience.” Clarifying here meaning: feeding the generational stereotype that young people can’t work a full day, talk to other humans, or function without a dopamine drip from screens.

The underlying data from the Understanding America Study doesn’t show freefall, it shows modest shifts of a few points on a 45-point scale. When you run the math, all those years between 2015 and 2023 explain just 2–4% of the change in scores. Put differently: eight years of supposed generational decline add up to a rounding error, not the end of civilization.

Enter the Skeptics

Our own behavioral scientist and head personality researcher, Stefano, put it in the most polite Canadian-academic way possible:

“The original paper didn’t make those bold claims, and the journalist seems to be playing psychologist…All this to say that I’m skeptical of the reporting here.”

Translation: bullshit, but said with maple-syrup manners.

And some other heavyweights of personality science — McCrae, Sutin, Donnellan — agree. Small changes, likely artifacts, and nowhere near grounds for claiming a generational freefall.  The Generational Bias Playbook is the oldest play in the book:

• Ancient Athens: “Kids today don’t respect their elders.”
• 1950s: “Comic books are rotting children’s brains.”
• 1980s: “Video games will make kids violent shut-ins.”
• Today: “Smartphones are collapsing personalities.”

Occam’s Razor for Trendlines

The lesson here is also as old as time: be skeptical of big, sweeping changes that seem too good or bad to be true. Data tortured to confess should make you suspicious.  If something looks out of whack it probably is.

Nine times out of ten, the world hasn’t shifted underneath us, only the Y-axis has.

Kevin