The eighth annual Beloit College Mindset List notes that most college freshmen in the fall of 2006 were born in 1988.

#11 Coffee has always taken longer to order than milkshakes

#12 Smoking has never been allowed on US airlines

#2 They have only known two presidents

The Mindset List is not designed for literalists. #1 is The Soviet Union has never existed and of course that’s not literally the case since the USSR wasn’t dissolved until 1991. But hardly anyone born in 1988 has a firsthand recollection of the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989 (#6 There has always been only one Germany), or the presidency of George H.W. Bush from 1989 – 93, so . . . slaves to historical precision and people given to overstatement may find themselves tripping over the timeframes. For the rest of us, there are useful cues for communication, design and marketing woven through the Mindset List.

For example:
#7 They’ve never heard anyone actually “ring up” a purchase on a cash register

#19 Google has always been employed as a verb

#23 Bar codes have always been just about everywhere

#28 Carbon copies have never been anywhere

#24 The name Madden has always been associated with videogames and never with the city of Oakland

#30 Non-denominational mega-churches have always been the fastest growing religious organizations in the US

#31 There have always been minivans

#38 Being techno-savvy has always seemed inversely related to age

#41 Wars and political revolts have always been televised in real time

#46 Public school officials have always had the legal right to censor school newspapers

#62 Acura, Lexus and Infinity have always been luxury cars of choice

#63 Television stations have never concluded their broadcast day with the national anthem.

#75 Professional athletes have always competed in the Olympics.

This is worth revisiting because what Beloit College calls mindset is a component of worldview—something about which we’ve had (and will have) much to say. Since the first ingredient in worldview is a person’s perceptions of the world, understanding our own and each other’s worldviews relies on acknowledging what we have always or never or only found in our firsthand experience of the world.

This is not to say that the class of 2010 shouldn’t (or won’t) learn a great deal in the next four years to expand their frame of reference. It’s only to say that if we anticipate teaching, hiring, developing, communicating with, learning from, designing for, selling to or collaborating with people whose life experience is different from ours, it is to our advantage to learn what Ray Bradbury learned about mindset:

The people there were gods and midgets and themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.
Dandelion Wine, William Morrow, 2001, page xiii