Generation Meh: Empathy and College Students Today

What? Me Worry?
Are you of the mind that today’s youth are “blindly self-aggrandizing?” Does all that entitlement send you through the roof? Is it just me or is there some truth to the patterns of behavior many people report seeing? In a paper presented at the Association for Psychological Sciences in Boston (May 2010), Sara Konrath found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than their counterparts in the 1970s, with percentages plunging primarily after 2000. Her paper, Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis, offered a measure of four aspects “interpersonal sensitivity” (n=13,737; ~63 percent female) :

• Empathetic concern (or sympathy) over the misfortunes of others;
• Perspective taking;
• An intellectual capacity to imagine other people’s points of view;
• Fantasy (or people’s tendency to to identify imaginatively with fictional characters in books or movies; and
• Personal distress (referring to the anguish one feels during others misfortunes).

The synopsis of this study, reported in the New York Times on June 27, 2010, shows that today’s college students scored significantly lower in empathetic concerns (48 percent) and perspective taking (34 percent)–considered the more important indicies of empathetic behavior. Shared social ideals such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” are considered less important than they were by college students 30 years ago. (The results reported were not disaggregated by gender, socio-economic status, or parents’ education level and marital status. A closer examination of the results associated with these independent variables might be useful in determining if there are any correlational effects.)

So what happened?
How did narcissism become so popular? In the Times report, Konrath and her report co-authors suggest that a mixture of cultural forces associated with video games, social media, reality TV and hyper-competition have left the younger generation “self-involved, shallow, and unfettered in their individualism and ambition” (Paul, 2010). The implications are biting, indeed. Research on low empathy in children is associated with violent behavior, aggression, and other anti-social behavior (Damon & Lerner, 2006). As these low empathetic youth grow into adults, these tendencies can lead to the results we are seeing in Konrath’s report. For educators, low empathy in students could make communication, group work, collaborative and networking activities exceedingly challenging.

I do not believe video games, social media, reality TV, and hyper-competition are necessarily the main culprits here. Perhaps the amount of cognitive surplus afforded today’s youth has some impact. Perhaps kids today are spending less time on chores, i.e., contributing meaningfully to the household, and more time in front of their computers and TV. While a recent reports suggests parents are spending more time with their children, it is not clear the ways in which parents are modeling pro-social behavior for their children. Are parents plopping kids down in front of the TV or computer or are they interacting together meaningfully?

So what can teachers do?
The implications for the reported low empathy findings are complex. For teachers, the Times article and report provide an opportunity to discuss these findings with their students. The key here is opening up an opportunity for dialog with students allowing them to share their thoughts on the issue of empathy. Keeping a journal that shows what kids are doing with their time outside school and a class discussion around their findings might also be useful and revealing to students. Role-playing is another safe and pro-social way to engage students in a discussion which, in turn, can help deepen their knowledge of empathy and empathetic behavior. While these suggested activities only scratch the surface, developing empathy and empathetic behavior is a critical skill that cannot be overlooked. If we want this depressing news regarding empathy in children and young adults to change, then we need to act now. If we don’t, as the Times article suggests, “don’t expect the next generation to sigh over it, too.”

References:
Damon, W. & Lerner, R. M. (2006). Handbook of Child Psychology: Social, emotional, and personality development. Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley & Sons.

Paul, P. (2010). From Students, Less Kindness for Strangers? New York Times, June 29, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/fashion/27StudiedEmpathy.html.

Image:

http://www.wickedresistance.com/blog/wp-content/postimg/2009/01/Meh-Web.jpg

Empathy as Social Literacy

In a post I wrote earlier this year, I spoke of the importance of empathy as a skill that needs as much attention as play and critical thinking. The following video featuring Jeremy Rifkin adds additional yeast to this argument as it offers further investigation into the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and society.

RSA Animate – The Empathic Civilisation

Rifkin notes that the growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species. The information communication technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history. Thus, by extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole, this “communication revolution” will provide an evermore inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand.

In what ways is this important for education?
Recognition that we are all in this together is a powerful concept–from cats and dogs, to children in Darfur, to bankers in Singapore. Recognition that each of our actions can have both a direct and indirect effect on each other is crucial in our flattened world. Empathy can help lower inhibitions and increase our sense of purpose as we seek to understand and feel what others are experiencing (emotive solidarity). The disadvantage of this approach in most school settings is that teaching students how to build empathy takes time and skill. I do not recall many opportunities for building empathetic skills in colleges of education, nor do I see it emphasized in any high stakes examinations. However, given the increased access to news and information and our increased ability to act and serve others in a crisis, empathy could be adopted within our current curricula frameworks as a form of social literacy–that is, the ability to read and understand people and situations.

Ultimately, learning how to empathize helps learners work more effectively with others and in teams. This in turn can lead to the development of such useful skills such as planning and organizing with others–a task that is essential in most social environments.

Reference:
Rifkin, J. (2010). The empathic civilization: The race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.