The popular view that young people are more self-absorbed than ever thanks to their parents' fixation on self-esteem stands challenged by two large new studies.

For the past 25 years, California college students have scored about the same on a test that measures narcissism — qualities such as arrogance and a sense of entitlement, says psychologist Kali Trzesniewski of the University of Western Ontario. Her report covers more than 26,000 students.

Another analysis she did from a large annual survey of high school seniors suggests that kids are no more conceited today than they were 30 years ago. The gap between their grades and how they rated their intelligence was no greater in 2006 than 1976, says Trzesniewski, whose studies are in the February "Psychological Science."

"They're not becoming more over-confident," she says.

The idea that baby-boomer parents have spawned a generation of self-important egotists took hold in the wake of research by Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University. Twenge wrote a widely publicized 2006 book called "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before."

But Twenge's reports on narcissism grouped together many studies of varying size in a way that can distort results, Trzesniewski says.

Twenge, for her part, says Asian students are highly over-represented in the more recent California personality tests, and they tend to be less narcissistic. Also, high school kids often are so self-conscious that they don't show the rising self-esteem she has found in elementary and college students.

About a quarter of youths are self-absorbed and hedonistic, says psychologist William Damon, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence. An additional 20 percent are "highly purposeful about contributing to the community," his research suggests. The rest fall somewhere in between, and how they'll turn out is unknown, Damon says.

Comparing personality test scores of young people today with scores from 25 years ago is not as simple as it may seem, says Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies early adulthood. "It's not enough to compare them at the same age. You need to compare them in the same stage of life. A 22-year-old is not at the same life stage as the 22-year-old a few decades ago."

"They may look more self-absorbed now," says Furstenberg, "because they're growing up later, marrying later and having children later. Young adults can be very self-absorbed. That doesn't mean they'll stay that way."