“We need to reach Gen Z.”
It sounds like the start of a clear question. It identifies an audience and suggests a shared set of experiences, preferences and expectations.
But how much does knowing someone’s age actually tell you about them?
This matters because every day across organisations, decisions are being made based on exactly this. Our heuristics and frameworks both define the questions that we ask, and the answers that we give. But how good those heuristics are, how close our assumptions are to the real world, defines how accurate our decision-making is.
Imagine you are playing golf, and think the flag is 110 yards away when it is actually 150. You can hit it exactly where you wanted and it can still be a poor shot. We rely on a similar judgement when making decisions about people. We need to understand how similar or different they are, as these judgements shape how we expect them to behave.
Imagine putting 100 American Boomers in a room and asking them 13 questions about a subject like politics, immigration, the economy, abortion, or AI. Around 20 would find someone whose answers matched their own on every question.
Now fill the room with 100 Gen Z Americans, and just nine would find a match.
That was one of the findings from our research into how people’s political views, trust and cultural influences differ across generations. Working with Professor Michael Muthukrishna and our colleagues, we analysed nearly 52,000 survey responses across the US, UK, France and Germany.
What emerged challenges one of the major assumptions behind a lot of political commentary and marketing: that knowing someone’s generation gives us a reliable guide to what they think.
The differences within a generation
Generational labels were useful shorthand, because people who grew up at a similar time shared the same experiences, from economic conditions to watching the same primetime television, shaping their beliefs similarly.
But as the amount of shared experience decreases, so may the degree of shared values.
The room of 100 people illustrates this. Among the Gen Z respondents, there were fewer people with exactly matching sets of answers. Knowing a young person’s position on one issue gave you less of a guide to their positions on others.
That makes it harder to talk confidently about what “Gen Z thinks” because Gen Z isn’t a distinct group, but highly varied with different experiences and beliefs. To understand people, we need to look more closely at their values, who they trust, the information feeds they follow and the cultural influences they encounter. Age can provide context, but it cannot answer those questions for us.
Why this matters for decisions
Good outcomes for organisations are made up of thousands of small decisions, most of which depend on an understanding of how people might respond.
A business deciding which product features to develop needs to understand the problem it solves, then decide how to message it so it resonates with its audience. A public institution introducing a service needs to understand what people need and how to encourage people to use it.
In the increased competition of the modern world, a campaign simply aimed at “Gen Z” speaks to no one. It needs to aim at people with similar values, not just a similar age.
And this improved understanding will reveal opportunities that competitors have missed: an overlooked need, an assumption worth challenging, a new market that is perfect for expansion, or a group whose views have been lost in the average.
Asking better questions
The reason this research matters is that the categories we use to understand people shape the questions we ask and the decisions we make. Our assumptions quietly determine what we notice, what we overlook and which opportunities we pursue.
A mistaken assumption in a brief can influence hundreds of decisions before anyone thinks to question it. A better understanding can reveal an unmet need, an unexpected audience or an opportunity no one else has spotted.
Sharing a birth year does not mean sharing a world. When a brief says “We need to reach Gen Z”, the work of understanding has just begun.
The full report
‘Gen Z is Unbound’ sets out the findings in full, with every chart, the method and a country-by-country appendix.
About the research
An online panel survey run by Electric Twin in two waves, 30 January to 6 March and 22 to 26 April 2026: 51,929 analysed responses from Gen Z to Boomers in the US, UK, France and Germany, quota-sampled on age, region and education
Muthukrishna, M., Warner, B., Peneva, Y.
