Sunday, June 6, 2010

Do today's college students lack empathy?

Current college students are 40 percent less empathic than their elders. So say the authors of an “Empathy Quiz” that was given to over 14,000 college students between the years 1979 and 2009. The study was done by Sara Konrath of the Univerity of Michigan and was presented last week at the meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Boston.

In the quiz, students were asked to rate themselves with respect to statements such as, “I sometimes find it difficult to see things from the ‘other guy's’ point of view," and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."

Dr. Konrath used the term “me generation” when discussing the results of the study. "Many people see the current group of college students—sometimes called 'Generation Me'—as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history," said Konrath, who is a psychiatrist affiliated with the University of Rochester.

She attributed this lack of empathy primarily to exposure to media and to online social networking. She contends that video games with violent content numb people to the pain of others. As for social networking, she and her assistant Edward O’Brien note, “The ease of having 'friends' online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don't feel like responding to others' problems, a behavior that could carry over offline.”

I find it interesting that neither Konrath nor her assistant traced empathy (or the lack thereof) to primary relations with parents or other humans. Instead they pointed to technology such as online networking and video games. This seems to be the trend nowadays—blaming things instead of people.

Long before children start playing video games or networking online, they learn about empathy through relations with their parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, grand-parents, kindergarten teachers and others with whom they are intimate. If children are shown empathy by their earliest caretakers, they begin to learn empathy.

But teaching empathy requires more than being an empathic parent. It also requires that parents set boundaries for their children and teach them to respect those boundaries and to respect their parent’s feelings. Perhaps this explains the disparity between the results of the Empathy Quiz by this generation and the previous generation. The previous generation understood empathy, but they didn’t understand how to teach it.

Instead of teaching empathy, they gave, gave, gave to their children without asking anything in return. The result is the “me generation,” a generation that demands human rights, but is not big on human responsibility. The result is also a culture that no longer values empathy as it once did. What do people value today? The most popular video games are about killing off other people and various monsters. The most popular movies seem to be about powerful people—sometimes superheroes—who “kick ass”. Movies or television shows (or video games) about empathic people are rare, if nonexistent.

For several generations now Americans have been presenting themselves to the world as “defenders of freedom” and “good guys that are saving the world.” But there may be a discrepancy between what we present and who we really are.