Jean M. Twenge

Jean M. Twenge has spent much of her life trying to answer a deceptively simple question: how does the culture we grow up in shape who we become? 

Jean M. Twenge, born in 1971, began her path into psychology with a curiosity about human behavior that steadily deepened into a lifelong academic pursuit. She studied at the University of Chicago, where she earned both her BA and MA, before continuing on to the University of Michigan to complete her PhD in psychology in 1998. Those early years laid the groundwork for what would become a defining feature of her career: a focus on how broad cultural forces quietly shape individual lives. 

Rather than fixating on small-scale experiments alone, Twenge gravitated toward big questions and even bigger data. When she began at San Diego State University, she analyzed massive datasets that spanned decades and included millions of participants. Through this wide lens, she noticed something striking: each generation’s values, ambitions, anxieties, and sense of self were shifting measurably with the culture around them. This discovery became the heartbeat of her work. 

Twenge emerged as a leading voice in the study of generational difference, writing for both academic audiences and the public. In Generation Me, her book on the rise of individualism among young Americans, she outlines how self-confidence and self-focus had grown alongside new cultural messages about identity. Additionally, in her book iGen, she turns her attention to those born after the mid-1990s, arguing that smartphones and social media have fundamentally reshaped adolescence. 

Over the years, Twenge has published nearly two hundred scientific articles and several widely discussed books, becoming a sought-after speaker and commentator. Her ideas have reached far beyond academia, appearing in major media outlets and shaping conversations among educators, parents, and policymakers who are trying to understand a rapidly changing time. 

Yet, at the core of her work remains that original question. How does the culture we grow up in shape who we become? By tracing the subtle but powerful ways culture evolves, Jean M. Twenge invites us to see ourselves not just as individuals, but as products of a particular moment in time—shaped, in ways we often don’t notice, by the world we grow up in.