Document – Excerpt from H. H. Remmers and D. H. Radler, “Teenage Attitudes,” Scientific American, 1958

What is today’s younger generation really like? What is its prevailing attitude; what is it thinking; how is it likely to handle its own and the world’s problems when it grows up? … [O]n a statistical basis we can paint something like a portrait of “the typical teenager.” Scientific surveys of the nation’s young people have made clear that their problems, beliefs and desires follow a characteristic pattern. …

Our samples of the younger generation have been drawn from the nation’s high schools, which since the early 1940s have enrolled virtually all of the country’s teenagers. Each sample consists of about 3,000 students, chosen to represent accurately all the high-school grades, the various sections of the country, rural and city dwellers and roughly the various family backgrounds. Aside from giving the correct statistical representation to these groupings, the samples are completely random ….The subjects’ responses are recorded anonymously …

The most significant place to start our examination of the results of these polls is to look at what U. S. teenagers list as their most common problems … At the head of the list is the wistful plea: “Want people to like me more.” And most of the things that 25 per cent or more of the teenagers list as problems express, in one form or another, the same sentiment. A majority of teenagers want to gain or lose weight or otherwise improve their appearance; they want more dates, more friends, more popularity; they get stage fright before a group, worry about their lack of self-confidence. Their overriding concern emerges again when they are asked direct questions about their feelings with respect to approval by others. More than half admit that they try very hard to do everything that will please their friends; 38 per cent declare that the worst of all calamities is to be considered an “oddball.“

Naturally these feelings carry over into behavior. Nearly all the teenagers say they disapprove of high-school students drinking-but a quarter of them admit that they drink. More than three quarters disapprove of smoking-but 38 per cent smoke. The whole matter is summed up in the comment of a teenage girl: “It’s hard for a teenager to say ‘I don’t care to’ when all the rest of the gang are saying, ‘Ah, come on.’”

… [W]hat should concern us much more is how the passion for popularity translates itself into an almost universal tendency to conformity among our younger generation. It runs through all social classes. American teenagers show substantial class differences in many aspects of their behavior, problems and aspirations, but in their desire for popularity and their conformist attitude they are as one: low-income or high-income, their highest concern is to be liked.

This is the most striking and most consistent fact that has emerged from our polls through the 17 years. Poll after poll among our youngsters has given statistical confirmation of the phenomenon of American life which David Riesman, in his book The Lonely Crowd, named “other-direction” -extreme sensitivity to the opinions of others, with a concomitant conformity. As a nation we seem to have a syndrome characterized by atrophy of the will, hypertrophy of the ego and dystrophy of the intellectual musculature.

This rather unpleasant portrait is an inescapable conclusion from the mass of data on the attitudes of the younger generation. More than half of our teenagers believe that censorship of books, magazines, newspapers, radio and television is all right. More than half believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police should be allowed to use wiretapping at will, that the police should be permitted to use the “third degree,” that people who refuse to testify against themselves should be forced to do so. About half of our teenagers assert that most people aren’t capable of deciding what’s best for themselves; fully 75 per cent declare that obedience and respect for authority are the most important habits for children to learn. On practically all questions of social policy the youngsters lean strongly to stereotyped views.

Such answers may represent either unthinking responses or convinced and deliberate acceptance of an authoritarian point of view. In either case the picture is equally unhappy. The road to totalitarianism is the same length whether we walk down it consciously or merely drift down it. Unthinking conformity provides a setting which makes it possible for a demagogue to lead a nation into slavery.

As individuals our nation’s young people consistently value others’ opinions above their own. Fewer than half claim that they think things out for themselves and act on their own decisions. Only one fourth report that they often disagree with the group’s opinion. No more than 18 per cent are willing to say that their tastes are quite different from those of their friends. Yet in spite of these admissions most teenagers declare that their freedom is not too limited.

Such soundings of the younger generation’s attitudes uncover some of the roots of anti-intellectualism in the U. S. Almost three quarters of the high-school students believe that the most important thing they can learn in school is “how to get along with people.” Only 14 per cent place academic learning first. In a recent poll of a representative sample of college students we found that the same attitude prevails at the university level: 60 per cent would rather be popular than brilliant; 51 per cent believe that students with low grades are more likely to be popular than those who get good marks; 72 per cent believe that development of a well-rounded personality is the main purpose of education; 71 per cent feel that personality counts more than grades when it comes to looking for a job.

The disdain for learning shows up most sharply and most dismayingly in the attitude of teenagers toward science and scientists ….More than a third find scientific work boring; 25 per cent think scientists as a group are “more than a little bit odd”; about 30 per cent believe that a scientist cannot enjoy life or raise a normal family. In a poll in October, 1957-the month of Sputnik 1—68 per cent of the teenagers said they would not like to be scientists. A majority asserted that scientists are likely to be radical, that they take no thought of the consequences of their work, that science should be restricted to physics and chemistry, that it is impossible to formulate scientific laws of human behavior. Most disquieting is the fact that views of this kind are just as common among students of high scientific aptitude as among those who have no interest in science. The climate of popular opinion among the nation’s youth undoubtedly is keeping many able boys and girls out of science ….

A need and craving to be liked, drifting with the crowd, conformity, a kind of passive anti-intellectualism—these seem to be outstanding characteristics of the present-day younger generation as it has expressed itself in our polls ….

The present conformist spirit—demonstrably not confined to the younger generation—seems to us something new in American life. It reverses our history and the American ideal, which has been, above all, individualistic. The American tradition suggests that we have not been in the past a people who passively accepted dictation by the crowd or surrendered the exercise of our freedoms.

[Teenagers’] attitude derives in large part, of course, from their parents. … In recent decades we have seen the individual steadily depreciated even in intellectual pursuits. There is a rising admiration for “the power of the group mind.” We have team research in science and “brainstorming” in industry. In every sphere group decision is replacing individual initiative.

In this light we must take a serious view of the tendency to conformity exhibited by the younger generation. In any circumstances it is always difficult for an adolescent to find himself. The teens are a time of transition, demanding adjustments to profound biological, emotional and social changes. Probably most parents today would testify from personal experience that the teenagers of our day are having an extraordinarily difficult time of growing up and finding themselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that the price of group agreement is descent to the least common denominator. As T. V. Smith and Eduard C. Lindeman remarked in their book The Democratic Way of Life, a democracy cannot afford to devalue “the finality of the individual,” from whom “all things flow.” In our view, the future of our democracy is not promising unless we restore a social climate which will reward independent thinking, personal morality and truly enlightened cooperation in place of going along with the crowd.