Is empathy declining?

A long term study of students at the university of Michigan suggests that empathy has been declining since the 1980s and 1990s, with a particularly steep drop after 2000:

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Konrath conducted the meta-analysis, combining the results of 72 different studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009, with U-M graduate student Edward O’Brien and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing.

Compared to college students of the late 1970s, the study found, college students today are less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”

The researchers suggest that the media may be to blame: “…this generation of college students grew up with video games, and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

They also hypothesize that the rise in socla media — where people have “friends” they don’t even know — and an increasingly competitive world, may be factors.

I suppose it’s possible that students are simply becoming more honest. Perhaps people in the past felt it was more socially acceptable to claim compassionate feelings they didn’t really have. In a way I hope it’s something like that: it’s bad enough having our health insurance companies, banks, etc, being managed by the people who run them now. What happens if a “less empathetic” generation starts running the country. Then, I think, we’re really screwed.