Are You More Ethical Than A Fifth Grader?

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According to a recent nationwide study conducted by the Girl Scout Research Institute (and no, I’m not kidding), tweens and teens today are more wholesome than their counterparts 20 years ago.

They claim to be less likely to cheat on tests, drink at parties or smoke and more likely to say that they plan to vote, volunteer and give to charity than the respondents the GSRI surveyed with the same questions in 1989.

Now compare these findings with another recent study conducted by Dr. Christopher Daddis of Ohio State University. Daddis measured perceptions among middle and high schoolers as to the risk behavior of their peers. His findings indicated that youth tend to overestimate the debauchery of their friends and adjust their own attitudes and behaviors (drinking, smoking, having sex, taking drugs, etc.) to be more in line with what they perceive as the norm, false though it may be.

So did the GSRI survey catch participants in a rare candid moment (maybe nobody is fully awake enough to front convincingly before second period?) or were their findings simply “pluralistic ignorance” working on the other end of the behavioral scale? Could the youth in the GSRI survey be tailoring their answers to reflect how they believe their peers would answer such a values-oriented survey? Given the moralistic nature of some of the questions (even a 10 year-old is savvy enough to understand that admitting to being likely to cyber-bully a classmate is “bad” and giving to charity is “good”), it isn’t a stretch to believe that respondents wouldn’t want to seem as if they were outlying transgressors, even if they didn’t have a personal objection to some of the activities they were surveyed on. Add in a not-yet-fully-inculcated sense of rebellion/desire to please authority figures (i.e., survey administrators) among the younger survey participants and you probably have a group of youth whose actual attitudes and behaviors are just as middle-of-the-road gray as those whom Daddis questioned.

Maybe kids today aren’t really more responsible and civic-minded than their peers from 20 years ago, they’re just savvier survey takers.