[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="499"] Source: DoctorDisney[/caption] Spoiler alert ahead! It's obvious, Disney has fallen in love with a new meta-theme: Wronged, cold-hearted, lonely woman unearths apocalyptic forces that overtake her kingdom, but is also the only one who can break the spell. But only after she rediscovers...
In America there is a sweeping shift in values towards more family diversity and we are starting to see this reflected in commercials for consumer goods. The shift reflects cohort changes (effects isolated to single generations) as well as period effects (change over time in an entire population)....
Sorry Kitty is lead singer of the K-pop band Saccharine.
Her nickname is a blend of Super Junior's 2009 hit Sorry, Sorry and the still popular cartoon Hello Kitty, and influenced by the post-ironic cat-meme era she was born into. She earned it for her allegedly sad expression as a child, but later made it her legal name as a provocative statement of Asian pride. While Korean women in the entertainment industry undergo canthoplasties and other plastic surgeries to look “less Asian”, Sorry embraces her Asian features and is unknowingly signaling a new trend that will unfold after her career takes off in 2030.
Sorry grows up as an only child of a Korean PR professional / Tigermother and a British DJ / sound engineer who moved to Korea to work as an English teacher when the job market dried up in Europe.
“How do I love (bankrupt) thee? Let me count the ways.”
This election year it’s hard not to take note of all the various ways in which the next generation is screwed. Younger cohorts will struggle with student loans, possibly endure continued high unemployment rates, foot most of the bill from the national deficit and suffer the effects of a national economy that has paid out more than it has taken in over a long time. The Z’ers, or Homelanders, see their grown up sisters and brothers test their wingspan only to return back to the safety of parental den when things go wrong. They are advised that an expensive college degree is the only means to a comfortable future, yet that there are no guarantees for anything anymore. One would think in a time when individuals feel the effects of a troubled economy family bonds grow stronger. And they do. Many parents gladly open up their homes to boomeranging grown children and quarterback them each time they test their employment muscles in the slow job market. But what the long-term financial security? If the younger generations are going to be held back for decades by the locked doors they meet now won’t family assets once again gain importance as a source of income? If neither a college degree nor a mortgage seems like a good investment you should at least be able to look forward to your fair share of the family estate. Right?
My last post brought up the endless discussion if people's intelligence is mainly the product of nurture or nature. Now psychological scientist Christopher Chabris of Union College and David Laibson, a Harvard economist, have revealed that intelligence cannot be traced to a specific gene. Previous studies...
The conclusions you draw are based on your initial perception[/caption]
After I wrote piece on generational archetypes and their characteristics for a newspaper a few years ago I was surprised by the number of animated reactions I received in the online comment section. People don't like to be pigeonholed, even under my pretense of doing social science trend research. It turns out that when social scientists and market researchers use demographic, economic and cultural data to glean insight into contemporary trends they are stepping on psychological minefields. Readers often feel stigmatized by the findings and believe this way of classifying people is just an intellectualized form of bigotry.
I understand this hesitation, but I feel strongly that the goal of a social scientist is not to compartmentalize certain types of people to solidify unfounded myths, but quite the opposite. When social scientists make generalizations it’s always – or should always be - based on value neutrality and scientific observations. Moreover the goal is not to neglect human agency and individual differences, but to say something about the general trends.
