“20 Things Every Twentysomething Is Tired Of Hearing,” “Every Year Of Your Twenties, Ranked From Worst To Best” and “27 Things Every Girl In Her Twenties Should Really Have By Now.”
The lists go on and on.
Gracing the homepage of the website¬Buzzfeed.com are plenty of lists compiled in an effort to inform 20 year olds about various things. The lists consist of everything from “Why 20-year-olds wouldn’t survive in The Hunger Games” to “What It’s Like To Be A Twentysomething, As Told By Mean Girls, Bridesmaids, and Girls.”
Rupert Nacoste, professor of psychology, explained that while it may seem like the 20-something generation is obsessed with lists, that’s not actually the case.
According to Nacoste, social psychologists discovered, and are continuing to discover, that what motivates human social behavior is social comparison. This is also known as interpersonal behavior.
“We do all kinds of social comparison,” Na¬coste said, “Every time you or someone asks a classmate how they did on the exam, you are doing social comparison. Making list is just another way of doing social comparison to try to establish some form of social reality.”
Buzzfeed’s lists are compiled of advice such as: “An emergency ice cream tub in the freezer at all times, for when you’re feeling the #twen¬tysomething blues,” “27 Things Every Girl In Her Twenties Should Really Have By Now,” “Life before the games was you lying in bed, binge-watching good shows on Netflix, so it’s safe to say that you’re severely out of shape” and “20 Reasons A Twentysomething Would Never Survive The Hunger Games” lists. These are just a few of the examples of the countless lists available online. It should also be noted that many of these lists are nearly identitcal with only slight variations.
According to Nacoste, another motivation of the need for lists is the idea of “keeping it simple” in the motivation of human social life.
“Social psychologists study what we call the ‘cognitive economic system,'” Nacoste said. “That system is made up of all the cognitive shortcuts we use to get through daily life, ste¬reotypes, cognitive heuristics. We use those shortcuts to keep it simple. Lists are another way of keeping things in our social world simple.”
Nacoste explained that these seemingly end¬less lists are made different by our current generation’s use of social media.
“Your generation has a lot of different places to display lists,” Nacoste said. “So it looks like an obsession, because now these lists appear everywhere and every day. But it’s not an ob¬session. This has been going on since humans learned to express language in writing.”
