At the 2025 Big Team Science Convention (BTSCon), Protzko presented new work on how we can start making progress on true generalizability and randomly sampling the globe.

In a provocative analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology, scholars John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler explore the roots of the “kids these days” phenomenon. That is, older folks’ perennial complaints about the declining quality and general waywardness of the generations who come up after them.

As Protzko and Schooler note, these complaints stretch back centuries, if not millennia. They tend to revolve around the corrosive influence of new technologies, which younger people tend to adopt more readily, and fade as those technologies move into the mainstream.

“Complaints about the printing press, corrupting people with bombardments of information, were largely limited to when the printing press was a newer societal advance,” they say. Back in Socrates’ day, over a thousand years before the advent of the printing press, writing itself was seen as a newfangled evil.

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Kristi Vallas from the Assumption Lab at CCSU was nominated for the 2025 APHA Lutterman Student Paper Award for her work on the health and behavioral and life effects of drug shortages. 

Kristi is the only current Masters' student since at least 2023 to be nominated for the award.

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I had the pleasure of presenting my PSY 596/597 research project at hashtag#APA2025 and could not have been happier with the feedback that I recieved from those individuals who stopped by to discuss my poster with me! 

I designed a within-subjects study to see if an AI-powered app, Hello History, could increase historical empathy scores. 

What is historical empathy? It is the ability to understand how the context of the past matters. It does not mean you agree with the actions or decisions. 

Why is historical empathy important? Because the past can affect the present and it is a hearty way to grow an individual sense of community and democracy. 

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When I say that every generation complains about the kids these days, I do mean all of them. We have documentation of this phenomenon going back to Socrates.

“It’s one of these things you keep seeing generation after generation,” says John Protzko, a psychology researcher at Central Connecticut State University and the co-author of the 2019 study “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking.”

Protzko’s study found that adults tend to judge kids by their own adult standards. If you’re an adult who likes to read, he says, you tend to assume that you read just as diligently as a child.

“And then I impose that on society at large: ‘Everyone liked to read as a kid,’” Protzko explains. Rapidly, that false belief can turn into “None of the kids today read like they did in my day.”....

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1. “Back in my day …”

Nothing fans the flames of what scholars call the “Kids-These-Days effect” faster than a nostalgic lecture. Studies show older adults routinely—and wrongly—assume today’s youth are lazier or less moral than previous cohorts. Psychologists

As John Protzko, a University of California Santa Barbara psychologist, says in Vox,  this bias is stable across centuries; each generation level-loads the same complaint onto the next.​

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...even Baby Boomers themselves were ridiculed for the same thing.

In their 2019 paper published in Science Advances, researcher John Protzko and psychologist Jonathan Schooler call this the “kids these days” effect. They noted that complaints have been made about young people all throughout time.

The persistence of these complaints suggests they are “neither accurate nor due to the idiosyncrasies of a particular culture or time — but rather represent a pervasive illusion of humanity.”...

Arguing that Researchers are Not their Governments, Protzko presented historic difficulties in international relations that have arisen as a results of international Big Team Science collaborations. In this talk, we advocated a possible path forward to bypass international disagreements between the governments of researchers.

...Protzko calls it the "kids these days effect," or more scientifically, a memory bias called "presentism."

"The bias is so ingrained in our memory systems that it's unlikely we'll ever stop thinking the kids these days represent a decline in our society," the university summarized about Protzko's research in 2019. "These gripes cut across not only generations, but also cultures."

...According to Protzko most of our memories are modified fabrications put together based on our current values and judgments, also known as presentism. If it’s hard to name exactly what happened last Tuesday, how are we to remember how we acted and thought at the age Gen Alpha is? Thus, saying “Back in my day, we never talked back to our parents! We did not take  everything for granted! We never did this and that!” is not a fair comment because those who do remember “their day” might think differently. 

A study delves into the question of whether obligations, like debt repayment, follow the mind or body when consciousness is transferred or a brain is transplanted. Findings reveal a divide in beliefs, with some professionals insisting obligations remain with the original body, while others suggest they accompany the transferred consciousness; intriguingly, public opinions were even more varied, highlighting the complexities if such science fiction scenarios become reality.