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Power comes in many forms within society. It can be demonstrated by physical force or, more commonly, it can relate to numbers or money. In my life, I find power in money, because when you have money you can pay people to work for you. With money you can control people in a way to get things done for you. For example, if you are in court, you can pay for a better lawyer and have a better chance of not going to jail.

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In the neighborhood that I live in there are some parts that are very wealthy who live in gated community's with huge homes. And there are other parts of the neighborhood who live in fairly normal sized homes. Fortunately the neighborhood im in is middle class where their tends to be much less crime. In places with more poverty have more crime.

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My family is the major thing that shapes my beliefs because I spend most of my time around them. I also look up to my parents so I agree with most of the things they think. My friends also shape my beliefs because I am also around them a lot and im friends with them because we have common interest.

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Technology is a huge part of my life because nearly everything I do in a day involves Tech. For example, In the morning my alarm clock wakes me up. Another example, is when my parents are driving me somewhere, they use a GPS to get to the location. Technology has been adapted to make everything much easier in day to day life.

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Some elements that shape my life are food. For example, when I eat food that isnt from my culture. I get to expand the foods I like and now I have more types of food to eat. Music can also shape my life. For example, when I listen to music in different languages or different types. It expands my genres of music I listen to.

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https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/generation-z-facts/

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Generation Z refers to the generation born between 1997-2012, following millennials.

Gen Z will soon become the largest cohort of consumers-and brands who want a piece of this opportunity will need to understand their tendencies and digital expectations.

Do you work in the Ecommerce and Retail industry? Get business insights on the latest tech innovations, market trends, and your competitors with data-driven research.

Generation Z (aka Gen Z, iGen, or centennials), refers to the generation that was born between 1997-2012, following millennials. This generation has been raised on the internet and social media, with some of the oldest finishing college by 2020 and entering the workforce.

Insider Intelligence has been tracking Gen Z's characteristics, traits, values, and trends to develop in-depth statistics, facts, and marketing strategies targeting what will soon become the largest cohort of consumers.

Featured Gen Z Articles

Gen Z Terms and Definitions

What is Generation Z (Gen Z)?

Generation Z, is the youngest, most ethnically-diverse, and largest generation in American history, comprising 27% of the US population. Pew Research recently defined Gen Z as anyone born 1997 onwards. Gen Z grew up with technology, the internet, and social media, which sometimes causes them to be stereotyped as tech-addicted, anti-social, or "social justice warriors."

What are Millennials (Gen Y)?

Millennials, also known as Generation Y, include anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 26 to 41 in 2022) and represent about a quarter of the US population. Much of this cohort entered the workforce at the height of the Great Recession, and have struggled with the subsequent widening of the generational wealth gap.

Millennials have led older generations in technology adoption and embracing digital solutions. Their financial status and tech-savviness have fundamentally changed how they live and work-earning them stereotypes that they job hop and have killed a number of industries. Prior to Gen Z, millennials were the largest and most racially and ethnically diverse generation.
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What is Generation X (Gen X)?

Generation X, also known as Gen X, the latchkey generation or, jokingly, the forgotten or middle child generation, consists of people born between 1965 and 1980 (ages 42-57 in 2022). Currently, Gen X comprises 20.6% of the US population, making them smaller than any other age demographic.

This cohort grew up with higher divorce rates and more two-income households, resulting in a general lack of an adult presence in their childhoods and teenage years. As such, Gen X is generally viewed as peer-oriented and entrepreneurial in spirit.

What is Generation Alpha?

Gen Alpha, which includes children born after 2010, is already set to be the most transformative generation yet. Alphas haven't just grown up with technology-they've been completely immersed in it since birth. Early in their formative years, these children are comfortable speaking to voice assistants and swiping on smartphones. They don't consider technologies to be tools used to help achieve tasks, but rather as deeply integrated parts of everyday life.

FAQs About Gen Z

What are the Generation Z birth years & age range?

Generation Z is broadly defined as the 72 million people born between 1997 and 2012.

Generation Z vs. Millennials (Gen Y)

Gen Z most closely mirrors millennials on key social and political issues, but without much of the optimism; More US Gen Zers than any other generation (68%) feel the US is headed in the wrong direction, and fewer Gen Zers than any other generation (32%) feel the country is headed in the right direction.

Is Generation Z conservative?

Generation Z considers itself more accepting and open-minded than any generation before it. Almost half of Gen Zs are minorities, compared to 22% of Baby Boomers, and the majority of Gen Z supports social movements such as Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, and climate change.

What are common names for Generation Z?

Generation Z, or Gen Z, is also sometimes referred to as iGen, or Centennials.

What is after Generation Z?

The generation that follows Gen Z is Generation Alpha, which includes anyone born after 2010. Gen Alpha is still very young, but is on track to be the most transformative age group ever.

What are the common Generation Z characteristics?

The average Gen Z got their first smartphone just before their 12th birthday. They communicate primarily through social media and texts, and spend as much time on their phones as older generations do watching television.

The majority of Gen Zs prefer streaming services to traditional cable, as well as getting snackable content they can get on their phones and computers.

In terms of US population by generation, Gen Z is the most ethnically diverse and largest generation in American history, and eclipses all other generations before it in embracing diversity and inclusion.

More to Learn

Generation Z will soon become the most pivotal generation to the future of retail, and many will have huge spending power by 2026. To capture a piece of this growing cohort, retailers and brands need to start establishing relationships with Gen Zers now.

But Gen Zers are different from older generations, because they are the first consumers to have grown up wholly in the digital era. They're tech-savvy and mobile-first-and they have high standards for how they spend their time online.

After ignoring the digital revolution and millennial buyers for too long, retailers and brands have spent the last decade trying to catch up to millennials' interests and habits-so it's critical for them to get ahead of Gen Z's tendency to be online at all times, and make sure to meet this generation's digital expectations.

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Generation Z News: Latest characteristics, research, and facts

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Generation Z refers to the generation that was born between 1997-2012, following millennials. Learn more about the generation raised on the internet & social media.

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/

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The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult. In the U.S., where the dialogue of inclusion is relatively advanced, even the mention of the word "diversity" can lead to anxiety and conflict. Supreme Court justices disagree on the virtues of diversity and the means for achieving it. Corporations spend billions of dollars to attract and manage diversity both internally and externally, yet they still face discrimination lawsuits, and the leadership ranks of the business world remain predominantly white and male.

It is reasonable to ask what good diversity does us. Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious-you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers and quality-control experts-but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So what is the upside?

The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers.

Information and Innovation

The key to understanding the positive influence of diversity is the concept of informational diversity. When people are brought together to solve problems in groups, they bring different information, opinions and perspectives. This makes obvious sense when we talk about diversity of disciplinary backgrounds-think again of the interdisciplinary team building a car. The same logic applies to social diversity. People who are different from one another in race, gender and other dimensions bring unique information and experiences to bear on the task at hand. A male and a female engineer might have perspectives as different from each other as an engineer and a physicist-and that is a good thing.

Research on large, innovative organizations has shown repeatedly that this is the case. For example, business professors Cristian Dezsö of the University of Maryland and David Gaddis Ross of the University of Florida studied the effect of gender diversity on the top firms in Standard & Poor's Composite 1500 list, a group designed to reflect the overall U.S. equity market. First, they examined the size and gender composition of firms' top management teams from 1992 through 2006. Then they looked at the financial performance of the firms. In their words, they found that, on average, "female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value." They also measured the firms' "innovation intensity" through the ratio of research and development expenses to assets. They found that companies that prioritized innovation saw greater financial gains when women were part of the top leadership ranks.

Racial diversity can deliver the same kinds of benefits. In a study conducted in 2003, Orlando Richard, now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his colleagues surveyed executives at 177 national banks in the U.S., then put together a database comparing financial performance, racial diversity and the emphasis the bank presidents put on innovation. For innovation-focused banks, increases in racial diversity were clearly related to enhanced financial performance.

Evidence for the benefits of diversity can be found well beyond the U.S. In August 2012 a team of researchers at the Credit Suisse Research Institute issued a report in which they examined 2,360 companies globally from 2005 to 2011, looking for a relation between gender diversity on corporate management boards and financial performance. Sure enough, the researchers found that companies with one or more women on the board delivered higher average returns on equity, lower gearing (that is, net debt to equity) and better average growth.

How Diversity Provokes Thought

Large data-set studies have an obvious limitation: they can show only that diversity is correlated with better performance, not that it causes better performance. Research on racial diversity in small groups, however, makes it possible to draw some causal conclusions. Again, the findings are clear: for groups that value innovation and new ideas, diversity helps.

In 2006 Margaret Neale of Stanford University, Gregory Northcraft of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I set out to examine the impact of racial diversity on small decision-making groups in an experiment where sharing information was a requirement for success. Our subjects were undergraduate students taking business courses at the University of Illinois. We put together three-person groups-some consisting of all white members, others with two white members and one nonwhite member-and had them perform a murder mystery exercise. We made sure that all group members shared a common set of information, but we also gave each member important clues that only he or she knew. To find out who committed the murder, the group members would have to share all the information they collectively possessed during discussion. The groups with racial diversity significantly outperformed the groups with no racial diversity. Being with similar others leads us to think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective. This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation.

Other researchers have found similar results. In 2004 Anthony Lising Antonio, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, collaborated with five colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other institutions to examine the influence of racial and opinion composition in small group discussions. More than 350 students from three universities participated in the study. Group members were asked to discuss a prevailing social issue (either child labor practices or the death penalty) for 15 minutes. The researchers wrote dissenting opinions and had both Black and white members deliver them to their groups. When a Black person presented a dissenting perspective to a group of white people, the perspective was perceived as more novel and led to broader thinking and consideration of alternatives than when a white person introduced that same dissenting perspective. The lesson: when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us.

This effect is not limited to race. For example, in 2013 professors of management Denise Lewin Loyd of the University of Illinois, Cynthia Wang of Northwestern University, Robert B. Lount, Jr., of the Ohio State University and I asked 186 people whether they identified as a Democrat or a Republican, then had them read a murder mystery and decide who they thought committed the crime. Next, we asked the subjects to prepare for a meeting with another group member by writing an essay communicating their perspective. More important, in all cases, we told the participants that their partner disagreed with their opinion but that they would need to come to an agreement with the other person. Everyone was told to prepare to convince their meeting partner to come around to their side; half of the subjects, however, were told to prepare to make their case to a member of the opposing political party, and half were told to make their case to a member of their own party.

The result: Democrats who were told that a fellow Democrat disagreed with them prepared less well for the discussion than Democrats who were told that a Republican disagreed with them. Republicans showed the same pattern. When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not.

For this reason, diversity appears to lead to higher-quality scientific research. In 2014 Richard Freeman, an economics professor at Harvard University and director of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research, along with Wei Huang, then a Harvard economics Ph.D. candidate, examined the ethnic identity of the authors of 1.5 million scientific papers written between 1985 and 2008 using Thomson Reuters's Web of Science, a comprehensive database of published research. They found that papers written by diverse groups receive more citations and have higher impact factors than papers written by people from the same ethnic group. Moreover, they found that stronger papers are associated with greater numbers of not only references but also author addresses-geographical diversity is a reflection of more intellectual diversity.

The Power of Anticipation

Diversity is not only about bringing different perspectives to the table. Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them, and that belief makes people change their behavior.

Members of a homogeneous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another, understand one another's perspectives and beliefs, and be able to easily come to a consensus. But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.

In a 2006 study of jury decision-making, social psychologist Samuel Sommers of Tufts University found that racially diverse groups exchanged a wider range of information during deliberation about a sexual assault case than all-white groups did. In collaboration with judges and jury administrators in a Michigan courtroom, Sommers conducted mock jury trials with a group of real selected jurors. Although the participants knew the mock jury was a court-sponsored experiment, they did not know that the true purpose of the research was to study the impact of racial diversity on jury decision-making.

Sommers composed the six-person juries with either all white jurors or four white and two Black jurors. As you might expect, the diverse juries were better at considering case facts, made fewer errors recalling relevant information and displayed a greater openness to discussing the role of race in the case. These improvements did not necessarily happen because the Black jurors brought new information to the group-they happened because white jurors changed their behavior in the presence of the Black jurors. In the presence of diversity, they were more diligent and open-minded.

Group Exercise

Consider the following scenario: You are writing up a section of a paper for presentation at an upcoming conference. You are anticipating some disagreement and potential difficulty communicating because your collaborator is American and you are Chinese. Because of one social distinction, you may focus on other differences between yourself and that person, such as their culture, upbringing and experiences-differences that you would not expect from another Chinese collaborator. How do you prepare for the meeting? In all likelihood, you will work harder on explaining your rationale and anticipating alternatives than you would have otherwise.

This is how diversity works: by promoting hard work and creativity; by encouraging the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes place. The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise. You have to push yourself to grow your muscles. The pain, as the old saw goes, produces the gain. In just the same way, we need diversity-in teams, organizations and society as a whole-if we are to change, grow and innovate.

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Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working