People judge the culture of their youth as better than what came before or after it.
TV Tropes quotes Sam Viviano, for many years MAD's art director, observing that the magazine was at its best whenever you first started reading it. The pattern has measurable parts: tastes in music form disproportionately in adolescence, and people rate past experiences more warmly in memory than they did at the time.
In practice
- A newspaper's longest-serving readers agree that its best years were the ones in which they started reading it, and the years differ by reader.
- A parent is certain that children's television was better in her day, as her own parents were about theirs.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is the reminiscence bump: memories and preferences formed in adolescence are unusually durable. Another is rosy retrospection, in which the unpleasant parts of the past fade faster than the pleasant ones. A third is survivorship: only the best work of the past is still remembered, while the present includes all of its mediocre work.
- In its favour
- Each part has research behind it, including the reminiscence bump, rosy retrospection in Mitchell and colleagues' 1997 study of holidaymakers, and the survivorship of old media.
- Against it
- Some past periods were genuinely better in particular fields, and the filter cannot say which. Treating every preference for older work as nostalgia can dismiss real judgements of quality.
- Standing
- Compare the reminiscence bump and survivorship bias.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind