by Ifediba Nwokedi

Created on: June 28, 2010   Last Updated: June 29, 2010

Youth culture has always been a part of civilised society's evolution. Not venturing too far into history, this has been portrayed in films and musicals like West Side Story to KidultHood. Today, there is growing concern about the increase in narcissistic personality traits in today's youth culture. Narcissism defines a tendency to love oneself excessively without any regard for others.

I recently got on a bus, and a young teenage girl tried to dodge paying her fair, but she was stopped by the bus driver. When she reluctantly attempted to pay her bus ticket with a five-pound note, she was told by the bus driver that she cannot pay with her five pound note because he is not obliged to provide change for a five pound note. Of course, this response only elicited a barrage of insults from the girl, who then proceeded to stamp up to the upper deck and refuse to leave the bus, grounding the bus and delaying all other passengers. This has become a regular occurrence on buses; teenagers definitely rules the roost, and they definitely know when to push your buttons. This adolescent girl felt she was perfectly within her rights to insult an adult in authority and disregard the needs of other passengers on the bus. Her sole aim was to punish the bus driver for questioning her in such a public way.

There are two sides to this story! We have to keep in mind that a healthy level narcissism is part of our personality development that allows us to have confidence in our abilities and know that our opinions are equally important.

A psychological study in 2006 that examined and compared the responses of a total group of 16,475 college students to an NPI (Narcissistic Personality Inventory) questionnaire taken separately in 1982 and 2006, showed that two- thirds of all participants had above average narcissism scores. To put this in perspective, this was 30% more than the score received in the 1982 study (as cited by Steven Warshawsky on www.americanthinker.com). This means that there is a significant upward trend in college students having narcissistic tendencies. In this case, they were American college students, but I believe this reflects similar trends in other countries in the world and more so western European culture.

Although the statistical validity of a narcissistic personality inventory score as a whole can be disputed, the overall consensus is that college students who represent youth culture seem to display high levels of a pattern of grandiosity. A narcissistic

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