Kids Today!
Orcas in Puget Sound have started wearing salmon as “hats” again. This behavior was first observed In the 1980s, then it disappeared and now it has resurfaced. Of course all the humans want too know, why are they doing this? Various hypotheses have been proposed, such as to demonstrate excess food ability or playfulness, but really, how could we know? According to Wikipedia, a fad is a collective behavior that develops within a culture, generation, or social group. Perhaps what the salmon-hat wearing Orcas are doing is distinguishing themselves from another group of Orcas, the non-salmon-hat wearing Orcas.
Humans naturally form in-groups and out-groups as a way to both define themselves as individuals and to foster group cohesion. In 1935, anthropologist Gregory Bateson developed the concept of schizmogenesis during fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Schizmogenesis describes how the behavior of individuals change through interactive feedback loops that can lead to social splitting and polarization. In the Dawn of Everything, authors David Gander and David Wengrow propose that schizmogenesis can explain differences between societies by the way that groups define themselves as different from their neighbors.
One way we divide people into groups is way by generation. In demographics and the social sciences, the term generation is used to describe age cohorts. In this context, a generation is considered to be a same age group which has experienced similar cultural experiences. The social scientist Karl Mannhiem identified that rapid social change in youth is crucial to the formation of generations. Some social scientists follow the “imprint hypothesis” of generations, which states that major historical events leave an imprint on the generation experiencing them at a young age.
In an index in Elizabeth Stewart’s book, No Thanks, Mom, she describes there’s a description of each generation’s style and it highlight’s how complex the differences in generational world view affect many aspects of their behavior. For example, there was a huge explosion in the availability and cost of consumer goods in the past 50 years. If you are a parent, you may have observed how many more tv shows, books, and toys have become available for kids since our own childhoods. But what the effect of all this plethora of material goods has done is make children less materialistic than their parents and grandparents. The effect of cultural conditions on the developing worldview of children is unpredictable.
Rapid change is natural and humans have adapted to handle them. Our strategies for survival include cultural adaptations as part of our tool kit for survival. The generation gap that occurs between parents and children reflects the changing conditions that occur between a parents youth and their children’s. As a social species, part of the creation of our own identities involves identifying with a group. Whether it is familial, cultural, national, ethnic or any other number of types of group, all humans form allegiances, including that of people their own age. Superficial differences, such as in fashion and language, help youth create the identities that they carry into adulthood with their peers and can create a social cohesion that helps them survive in a changing cultural environment.