U.S. Teens Awash in Overconfidence

Twenge criticizes the self-esteem movement, which has strongly influenced American culture and schools for decades now, saying it's gone too far. It has brought youths today, she said, to the point of being out of touch with reality. "High school students' responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that's effectively [confined to] the top 20 percent," Twenge said.

She and Campbell took kids' answers to Monitoring the Future questions from 1975 and 2006, looking specifically at 13 questions that focused on how students viewed their own intelligence, fitness for the workforce, and qualifications for being good spouses and parents.

"When we look at the responses of the students in the seventies, they are certainly confident that they are going to perform well, but their responses are more modest, a little more realistic" than those in 2006, Twenge explained. For example, in 1975, only about 37 percent of adolescents considered themselves "very good" spouse material, while in 2006, more than 56 percent of those surveyed did.

In the same manner, 36 percent of the 1975 respondents anticipated being "very good" parents. Fifty-four percent did in 2006. Roughly half of the 1975 survey-takers thought they'd be great workers, while that figure rose to nearly two-thirds in 2006. The pattern was repeated in the area of self-reported academic achievement. In 1975, 7.7 percent of respondents said they had an "A" average. In 2006, 15.6 percent did.