Key Takeaways
- Perfectionism rose linearly between 1989 and 2016 across 41,641 college students in the US, Canada and UK (Curran & Hill, 2019).
- The rise wasn’t even. Self-oriented perfectionism went up around 10%, other-oriented around 16%, and socially prescribed around 33%.
- That largest increase is in the most damaging dimension: the belief that other people demand perfection from you.
- The authors point at competitive individualism, meritocratic pressure and social comparison as drivers, though the explanation drew published criticism.
- Useful reframe: if the thing has moved a third in a generation, it’s responding to conditions rather than describing your character.
Your parents had standards. Their parents had standards. Every generation thinks the next one has it easier, and “kids today are more anxious” is the kind of claim that usually turns out to be nostalgia wearing a lab coat.
This one has numbers behind it. Not vibes, not a survey of 400 people, but 27 years of data and a linear trend.
This article covers what the meta-analysis found, which dimension rose fastest and why that’s the bad news, what the authors think caused it, and where their explanation has been challenged.
What the study did
Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill pooled 164 samples of college students who had completed the same perfectionism measure between 1989 and 2016. In total, 41,641 students from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2019.
The design is a cross-temporal meta-analysis. Rather than following people over time, it compares scores from equivalent groups measured decades apart, which is how you detect a generational shift rather than an individual one.
What it found
All three dimensions rose, and the increase was linear across the whole period rather than a recent spike.
Self-oriented perfectionism, the standards you set for yourself, rose roughly 10%.
Other-oriented perfectionism, the standards you hold others to, rose roughly 16%.
Socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that others demand perfection from you, rose roughly 33%.
Read those in order, because the ranking is the finding. The dimension that grew fastest is not the one where you push yourself harder. It’s the one where you believe the world is judging you against a standard you can’t meet.
What a 33% rise actually measures
Worth being precise here, because the figure gets reported as though a third more people have a condition.
What rose was the average score on a questionnaire, the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, which asks people how strongly they agree with statements about standards and expectations (Hewitt & Flett, 1991). A 33% increase means today’s students agree more strongly with items like the ones about others demanding perfection than students in 1989 did. It does not mean a third more people crossed a diagnostic line, because there isn’t one. Perfectionism is a continuous trait, not a category.
That sounds like a downgrade of the finding and it isn’t. Shifting the average of an entire population is harder than it looks, and small average movements redistribute the tails. If the whole distribution slides upward, the number of people at the extreme end grows faster than the average does. So the headline understates what happens at the severe end while overstating what happens to any individual.
Why that ordering is the bad news
If the biggest rise had been in self-oriented perfectionism, the story would be a generation with high personal standards. Uncomfortable, but not obviously pathological.
Socially prescribed perfectionism is the dimension with the strongest links to serious outcomes. A 2022 review in Clinical Psychology Review argued for treating it as a public health concern, describing it as a chronic pressure that generates helplessness and hopelessness at high levels, with established links to depression and suicidal ideation (Flett et al., 2022).
It’s also the dimension least responsive to individual effort. You can decide to lower your own standards. You can’t decide that other people have stopped judging you, because the belief is about them.
Our breakdown of the types of perfectionism covers why that distinction changes what helps.
What the authors think is driving it
Curran and Hill’s explanation is cultural rather than psychological. They locate the rise in the spread of competitive individualism from the 1980s onward: economies organised around ranking, education systems that sort people by measurable output, and a meritocratic story in which outcomes are treated as verdicts on the person.
They followed it up in 2022 with a second cross-temporal meta-analysis, this time on parenting. Drawing on more than 20,000 college students across the same three countries, they reported that young people’s perceptions of their parents’ expectations had risen roughly 40% since 1989, with a large association between perceived parental expectations and criticism and socially prescribed perfectionism specifically (Curran & Hill, 2022).
Social media is the obvious modern suspect, and it plausibly contributes. Note the timeline though: the trend runs from 1989 and is linear across the whole window, so it was well underway before anyone had a feed to scroll. Platforms may have accelerated something that was already moving rather than started it.
Where the explanation gets challenged
The measured increase and the story about why are two different claims, and it’s worth keeping them separate.
The parenting account drew a published comment in the same journal, and the objections are specific enough to be worth knowing (Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2019).
The concept is doing two jobs. Parental control can mean structure, meaning rules and expectations, or it can mean pressure, meaning conditional approval and intrusiveness. Only the second has been implicated in the development of perfectionism, and the commentary argues Curran and Hill do not keep them apart.
The parenting data points the other way. This is the sharper point. The few available studies on historical change in parenting do not show controlling parenting increasing, and if anything suggest the opposite. So the mechanism proposed to explain a rise in perfectionism may itself not be rising.
A later meta-analysis of parenting behaviours and trait perfectionism found the associations real but modest, which fits the pattern of parents mattering without carrying the whole trend (Smith et al., 2022).
Curran and Hill published a reply, arguing for multiple pathways rather than a single parental one (Hill & Curran, 2019). Both sides of that exchange are in the same issue of the journal, which is worth knowing if you have only ever seen the finding summarised in a headline.
Other honest limitations: the samples are college students, so this describes a fairly specific slice of the population. All three countries are wealthy and English-speaking. And a cross-temporal design can’t rule out that the meaning of the questionnaire items has shifted, since answering “people expect a lot of me” in 1991 may not mean quite what it means now.
None of that undoes the trend. It does mean anyone telling you exactly why this happened is ahead of the evidence.
The economic reading
The part of Curran and Hill’s explanation that gets least attention is also the most testable.
Their argument isn’t mainly about parents or phones. It’s that from the late 1970s onward, the US, Canada and the UK shifted toward market-based competition as the organising principle of public life, and that a society which sorts people by measurable output will produce people who experience their output as a measure of themselves.
They report that fluctuations in perfectionism track economic indicators: shrinking GDP per capita associated with increased striving, and growing income inequality associated with the more fearful, paralysed variety. Treat that as suggestive rather than conclusive, because correlating two trends over time is a design that generates plausible stories easily.
Still, it explains something the parenting account doesn’t. Socially prescribed perfectionism rose at roughly twice the rate of the other two dimensions. If the driver were simply pushier parents, you would expect self-oriented perfectionism to move comparably. A story about visible ranking and conditional social standing predicts exactly the pattern observed: the sharpest rise in the belief that other people require perfection.
What this changes for you
The practical value of a generational finding is that it takes the question off you.
If socially prescribed perfectionism has risen by roughly a third in 27 years, then the pressure you feel is not a quirk of your personality or a failure of your upbringing. Traits don’t move that fast across whole populations. Conditions do.
That doesn’t make it easier to carry. It does change what you’re solving. “Why am I like this” has no useful answer. “What in my environment is generating this, and which parts can I change” has several, and it’s the question our guide to what actually helps is built around.
When to talk to a professional
Perfectionism isn’t a diagnosis, so there’s no threshold to clear before it counts.
Worth raising with someone qualified: if falling short reliably produces shame rather than disappointment, if the standards are costing more than they return, or if the pattern comes with persistent anxiety, low mood, or disordered eating. Perfectionism is one of the areas where therapy has real trial evidence behind it.
If the pressure feels like it comes from everywhere
Socially prescribed perfectionism is the hardest dimension to work on alone, precisely because it feels like a fact about the world rather than a belief. A therapist can help test that, and work on the shame that attaches to falling short. Our guide to finding the right therapist covers what to look for, what it tends to cost, and how to start without a referral.
The takeaway
Something in the water changed between 1989 and 2016, and the clearest signal is that young people increasingly believe the people around them require perfection.
That’s worth knowing for one specific reason. Perfectionism presents itself as a private failing, something wrong with how you’re built, and it’s very good at that disguise. A linear population trend is the cleanest available evidence that it isn’t. You are, at least partly, responding correctly to a set of conditions that got measurably more demanding.
Which leaves a better question than self-diagnosis: what would need to change, in your work or your relationships or what you consume, for the standard to feel less total? Some of that is reachable. Our full guide to perfectionism covers the wider picture.
Frequently asked questions
Is perfectionism really increasing?
Yes, according to the strongest available evidence. A meta-analysis of 41,641 college students across the US, Canada and UK found linear increases in all three dimensions of perfectionism between 1989 and 2016. The samples are college students in wealthy English-speaking countries, so the finding is well established for that group.
How much has perfectionism increased?
Between 1989 and 2016, self-oriented perfectionism rose roughly 10%, other-oriented roughly 16%, and socially prescribed roughly 33%. The increases were linear across the whole period rather than a recent jump, which argues against blaming any single recent development.
Why is perfectionism getting worse?
The researchers point to the spread of competitive individualism since the 1980s: economies and education systems organised around ranking, and a meritocratic framing that treats outcomes as verdicts on the person. That explanation is plausible but less settled than the trend itself, and the parenting component drew a published rebuttal.
Is social media causing perfectionism?
It may contribute, but the timeline complicates the story. The rise is linear from 1989, well before social media existed, so platforms more likely accelerated an existing trend than started it. Treating social media as the sole cause also makes the problem look more recent and more individual than the data suggests.
Does this mean my perfectionism is not my fault?
Population-level trends do not settle individual cases, but they do shift the framing. A trait that moved by roughly a third in a generation is responding to conditions rather than describing fixed character. That makes environment a more useful place to look than self-blame, without making the pattern any easier to carry.
Sources
- Curran, T., & Hill, A. P. (2019). Perfectionism is increasing over time: a meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 410–429. DOI
- Hewitt, P. L., & Flett, G. L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(3), 456–470.
- Curran, T., & Hill, A. P. (2022). Young people’s perceptions of their parents’ expectations and criticism are increasing over time: implications for perfectionism. Psychological Bulletin, 148(1–2), 107–128.
- Soenens, B., & Vansteenkiste, M. (2019). Are parents responsible for the rise of perfectionism? Comment on Curran and Hill (2019). Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 430–432.
- Hill, A. P., & Curran, T. (2019). A case for multiple pathways to increasing perfectionism: reply to Soenens and Vansteenkiste (2019). Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 433–435.
- Smith, M. M., Hewitt, P. L., Sherry, S. B., Flett, G. L., & Ray, C. (2022). Parenting behaviors and trait perfectionism: a meta-analytic test of the social expectations and social learning models. Journal of Research in Personality, 96, 104180.
- Flett, G. L., Hewitt, P. L., Nepon, T., Sherry, S. B., & Smith, M. (2022). The destructiveness and public health significance of socially prescribed perfectionism. Clinical Psychology Review, 93, 102130.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Perfectionism is not a clinical diagnosis, and this article cannot diagnose you with anything. Always seek the advice of a qualified professional with any questions about your mental health.
If you’re struggling or in crisis
US: Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), 24/7, free and confidential.
UK & ROI: Call 116 123 (Samaritans), free, 24/7.
International: Find a helpline at findahelpline.com.
