Jean Twenge
American psychologist
Jean Marie Twenge (born August 24, 1971) is an American psychologist researching generational differences, including work values, life goals, and social attitudes. She is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, author, consultant, and public speaker. She has examined generational differences in work attitudes, life goals, developmental speed, sexual behavior, and religious commitment.
She is also known for her books iGen, Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic. In the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic, Twenge argued that smartphones were the most likely cause behind the sudden increases in mental health issues among teens after 2012. Twenge co-authored a 2017 corpus linguistics analysis that said that George Carlin's "seven dirty words you can't say on television" were used 28 times more frequently in 2008 than in 1950 in the texts at Google Books. Twenge said the increase is due to the dominance of self over social conventions.
Education
Twenge was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan where she was awarded a PhD in 1998 for a meta-analysis of assertiveness, sociability and anxiety.
Career and research
Twenge's research investigates issues around generations, personality, social psychology and gender roles.
In 2017, Twenge wrote an article in The Atlantic asking "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" which presented findings from her book iGen.
“Jean Twenge” enters the record as american psychologist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jean, Twenge and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q32979574. VIAF identifies the subject as 166476297. The Library of Congress control number is n2005087918. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 2017, 2012 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean Twenge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.