Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time: A Meta-Analysis of Birth Cohort Differences From 1989 to 2016
By T. Curran, A. Hill. Psychological bulletin, 2017
656 citations recorded by the source corpus.
From the 1980s onward, neoliberal governance in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom has emphasized competitive individualism and people have seemingly responded, in kind, by agitating to perfect themselves and their lifestyles. In this study, the authors examine whether cultural changes have coincided with an increase in multidimensional perfectionism in college students over the last 27 years. Their analyses are based on 164 samples and 41,641 American, Canadian, and British college students, who completed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (Hewitt & Flett, 1991) between 1989 and 2016 (70.92% female, Mage = 20.66). Cross-temporal meta-analysis revealed that levels of self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, and other-oriented perfectionism have linearly increased. These trends remained when controlling for gender and between-country differences in perfectionism scores. Overall, in order of magnitude of the observed increase, the findings indicate that recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3065d8baa21067b43f22e56a2c35be45864b0fa8
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In Clinical Psychology
- A. Hill
- P. Hewitt
- Gordon L. Flett
- Simon B. Sherry
- Joachim Stoeber
- Gareth E. Jowett
- Martin M. Smith
- Sarah H. Mallinson-Howard
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Multidimensional Perfectionism in Sport: A Meta-Analytical Review (2018, background): “…particularly noteworthy given that there is emerging evidence of cultural differences in the correlates of perfectionism (Stoeber, Kobori, & Tanno, 2013), as well as evidence of differences in levels of perfectionism and how it has changed over time in different counties (Curran & Hill, 2017).”
- Neoliberal ideology in work and organizational psychology (2018, background): “For instance, the individualization of society (Bauman, 2000; Curran & Hill, 2017) has caused employees to become self-reliant, forcing them to negotiate their own contract terms at work (Rousseau, 2005), and to be proactive at work and “employable” (Parker & Bindl, 2017).”
- Multidimensional perfectionism turns 30: A review of known knowns and known unknowns. (2021, background): “Finally, at the societal level, self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism (Curran & Hill, 2019), as well as doubts about actions (Smith, Sherry, Vidovic, et al., 2019), have increased linearly over the past three decades.”