Plunge in Conscientiousness Among Young, a Critical Quality for Personal and Societal Success

I must confess to be wanting in imagination. Widespread adoption of smartphones has led to a fall in social skills. Examples are pervasive, such a family members fooling with their devices rather than talking to each other at meals and our recent discussions of dysfunctional dating behaviors, such as the collapse in the ability to flirt, it had not occurred to me that these changes in habits were so extensive as to generate changes in personality, or if one prefers, temperament. But a new Financial Times account makes just this case, focusing on the most marked character change, that of a fall in conscientiousness.

Now admittedly, it is common throughout history for oldsters to complain about the comparative unfitness of the young to be trusted with responsibility. But the story by John Burn-Murdoch provides data that shows that all age cohorts are showing changes in personality that work against cooperation, with the declines most marked in the youngest cohorts. He makes the case that conscientiousness is the most important personality trait for personal success. From the pink paper:

In fact, studies consistently find that traits such as conscientiousness (the quality of being dependable and disciplined), emotional stability or agreeableness have a stronger link with professional success, relationship durability and longevity than the links between those outcomes and someone’s intelligence or socio-economic background.

Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help.

Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations — from always-on mobile internet and the lures of social media and online gambling, to hyper-palatable foods — the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower.

While the terminology of personality can feel vague, the science is solid. Decades of research consistently finds that all these shifts are in the direction associated with negative outcomes down the line.

If you look at the charts, you’ll see the decay in all of the seen-as-positive attributes (a word on extraversion in due course) predates the Covid lockdowns; the slope on the conscientiousness line is freakishly consistent from about 2016 onward. Neuroticism among the young similarly started to speed its rise before Covid and the rate of decline in agreeableness moderated a tad during the lockdowns. Ditto extraversion. So although the lockdowns didn’t help, they can’t be depicted as a driver of these changes.

Another chart shows considerable decay in self-assessments for all age groups for what one might view as sub-components of conscientiousness (save “can be distracted” where only the youngest group scored deterioration):

As the operator of a postage-stamp-sized business, conscientiousness is absolutely critical. I consider myself extremely lucky both to have exceedingly conscientious writers, moderators, and tech staff who are also very competent. Even at McKinsey in my day, there was an odd tolerance for consultants who were perceived to do brilliant analysis but were a bit sloppy on deadlines. In the news-related publishing business, that type get flushed out quickly. Getting copy in on time is imperative.

Needless to say, in other lines of commerce, while time requirements are not necessarily as exacting, most jobs require a high degree of reliability, such as turning up more or less on time. And let us not forget that being able to push the envelope at your job by making a habit of late arrival (if nothing else annoying co-workers even if you do get your tasks completed as required, since the practice raises the specter that they might have to take up your slack) is a modern luxury. In the days of subsistence farming, it was imperative to plant and harvest when conditions required. Sloughing off was anti-survival.

This fall in reliability also justifies the increasingly common practice among managers of intensive surveillance of their employees, on the pretext that it’s necessary to keep them on task and prevent faffing off. This argument is based on modern Taylorism, that workers should be expected to be machines and operate at a highly productive level during their entire workday. This is a myth; among many others, the Harvard Business Review debunked it, based on a review of over 80 studies.

But cynically, why should younger people be diligent and responsible? The deck is stacked against them with ever rising housing, medical, transporation, and thanks to tariffs, soon-to-arrive higher technology and food costs. Why do anything other than what you can get away with if the system is stacked against you?

The falls in agreeableness¹ in those under 60 and extraversion across the board are also striking. Yours truly, as befits a curmudgeonly outlook, regards both as generally overrated, since in combination they help produce and enforce conformity. Comments on Twitter suggest that a reason people don’t wear masks is not wanting to appear different/deviant and worse be on the receiving end of criticism.² I have long suspected that the reason employers are so keen to promote extraversion and (gah) “positivity” is a desire to keep dissent and doubt to a minimum.

The article provides further evidence of decay in postures considered important for smooth social relations:

With the US propensity to fetishize extraversion and related activities like networking, the fall in “is outgoing” goes very much against that grain. And even though introverts must gird their loins to find the energy to hang out with other people, they will typically concede the value in forging better relations and often getting more insight and information. The fall in trust is striking, and is due to more than a rise in tech-mediated dealings. Back in the early 2000s, Elizabeth Warren decried “tricks and traps” in typical financial services industry contracts. Those tricky practices have become common in other areas, particularly healthcare, witness the explosion in surprise billing and the celebration of St. Luigi.

But it’s not hard, and not wrong, to see tech attachment as the big perp. Again from the article:

While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits. The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting”.

Even so, there are also important reinforcing behaviors. Yours truly is so bold to suggest that pervasive lack of leadership across Western institutions is also playing a big role. Modeling responsible behavior has ripple effects across organizations and into wider society.

Across the board, the Collective West instead has people in authority who, virtually without exception, shirk making difficult decisions, let alone put shoulder to wheel to make sure that ambitious initiatives are seen though to completion. Instead we have Potemkin bosses, pretty faces with soothing voices who really do believe that controlling the narrative is the same as doing the work. Look at the news just this week out of the UK and Europe. The officialdom remains fixated on Project Ukraine rather than doing the guts of their job, which is to assure improving or at least not decaying material standards to their citizens, even in the face of rising poverty and even hunger, energy-cost induced business cutbacks, and budget crises.

And we have the issue we alluded to above: the disconnect between the self-anointed elites and the great unwashed. To the extent those at the top of the food chain care about concrete results, it’s the impact they have on their cohort and not society at large.

We argued in a 2024 post, Devolution and the Decline in Operational Capacity and Elite/Managerial Competence, that technology played a role in this sorry development:

Many pundits and commentators have been taking notice of how a worrisome number of people in positions of power in advanced economies seem unable to manage their way out of a paper bag. This is taking place despite the fact that the US, EU, and UK prize having credentials, as in at least a college education, in many cases advanced degrees, and in some posts, relevant experience (expertise in a particular field). One would think that the attainment of these status markers would require a minimum level of being able to set goals, identify what it would take to reach them, and then work in systematic way towards the objective….

The conventional explanations, of late-state capitalism/neoliberalism run wild and elite malfeasance, do not seem sufficient to explain the pervasiveness and acceptance of rank incompetence. I think we need to consider other factors to get a full picture.

One that seems likely to me is devolution, used in the sense where I first encountered the term, in Fine Arts 13 in college. This was a serious history of arts course, with tough exams.

It used “devolution” to describe how technology made possible increased output at the cost of increased crudeness. The example was carved statues. In the classical Greek era, all statues were made using chisels. In the later Roman period, artists started to use drills. It was not hard to see the difference in the quality of the work; if nothing else, curls and other renderings of hair were subtly cruder with the drills.

Not only did this change result in a reduction of skill levels, but it also may have changed aesthetics, as in produced an acceptance fo the coarser statues and a loss of appreciation for more finely detailed pieces.

To our current situation. I recall reading management guru Peter Drucker, the dean of the later industrial era in the US, worrying around 1980 about how the symbol economy was becoming detached from the real economy and he did not see how that could be reversed…

1980 was just before desktop computing became prevalent. I was one of the last generation on Wall Street to prepare financial analyses and forecasts on green accountants’ ledger paper, ordering SEC and company records from the library, extracting numbers manually and entering them by hand, then crunching numbers with a calculator. That laborious process weirdly had an upside. All the juniors at Wall Street shops understood the ins and outs of financial statements…

The class after mine instead made significant use of company data printed out from Compuserve. That was known to have errors. Yet the normally mistake-phobic Goldman corporate finance department didn’t have a concern about using bad data with clients (who might even recognize some of the Compuserve mistakes), in that the view seemed to be sort-of-official corrupted information was OK. It was also clear these younger bankers wound up less technically knowledgeable.

Now consider just this first order effect. The deskilling of the work would allow more senior people to devalue the labor of the lower ranks, as in see them as not deserving of as much pay. That did not happen in investment banking; the bosses demanded more output instead. But in many fields, from computing to law, entry-level jobs were being substantively hollowed out, with fewer and fewer opportunities to learn tradecraft….

We can see this propensity even more in hourly work, with increased surveillance and explicit productivity demands on seen-as-low-level laborers. The bosses treat them as tools, with little belief that their observations matter or that they have developed skills (beyond mastering company routines) that have much value.

A second effect has been the tendency to mistake menus with meals, which has many manifestations, such as believing that PowerPoint presentations correspond to reality. Again I saw this on Wall Street with the way spreadsheet programs made it vastly easier to run financial forecasts. Before, forecasts were generated only when necessary, such as merger modeling. The reason was they were very costly. One error would make everything to the right incorrect….

Due to the resources and time required, anyone who prepared these forecasts thought long and hard about the underlying scenarios they were meant to represent. But when it became trivial to jigger assumptions and produce yet another model run, I saw not just the M&A bankers but even the clients treat the model as if it were the deal, as opposed to a representation of a deal. Making the numbers work, which had always been a concern, started to become paramount….

The more general point, which I have yet to tie neatly into the decline of operational competence, is that the deployment of technologies has resulted in many many tasks becoming much easier. This has contributed to naive managerialism, that if a subordinate or interlocutor tells someone that a situation is difficult, it must be because they aren’t clever, or worse, are trying to con you by making mountains out of molehills. Many have the propensity to fire or otherwise sideline parties who are trying to give them a picture of unpleasant realities and instead turn to enablers. In the bad old days, there were more natural checks on this sort of behavior, since managers and executives tended to have long job tenures at one or two companies, so bad judgement would catch up with some of them. But with job-hopping, misleading accounting (like hiding losses then having every five year purges, presented as special writeoffs), highly-developed PR and stock buybacks to cover up for poor performance, accountability is virtually non-existent in the corporate arena, where measurable results are supposed to matter.

Burns-Murdoch cheerily contends that despair is not warranted. Personality is malleable, after all. But all the incentives point towards even more of the same.

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¹ A broader societal issue is that most people are not skilled enough at disagreeing without seeming to be disagreeable, as in difficult or obstinate. This is why high-stakes and potentially contentious matters wind up in the hands of diplomats and negotiators. Perhaps things have changed, but when I was in Australia in the early 2000s, it was evident that Aussies were better at handling differences of views than dogmatic and often self-important Americans. They were adept at using humor to make their points.

² No doubt readers can come up with examples from their own circles, but an example of the power of social assent: a friend who is in a Covid risk category and had been pretty good about masking on the crowd-intensive portions of a trip, literally took hers off on an airplane because she was the only one wearing one, rationalizing that it was only an hour and a half flight. She became very sick afterwards. I don’t recall if she tested herself for Covid, but if not that, it was a bad case of RSV.