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Students Show a Dramatic Drop In Empathy
MotorMachineMercenar writes "Several news sources report that today's college students show a precipitous drop in empathy (here's MSNBC's take). The study of 14,000 students shows that students since the year 2000 had 40% less empathy than those 20 and 30 years before them. The article lays out a laundry list of culprits, from child-rearing practices and the self-help movement, to video games and social media, to a free-market economy and income inequality. There's also a link so you can test your very own level of narcissism. Let's hope the Slashdot crowd doesn't break the empathy counter on the downside."
.. the linked test reminds me of those "what job are you best suited for" tests we got in school. The ones which after answering at least 100 very transparent and subjective questions would recommend you become a garbage man, an astronaut, or maybe a carpenter.
And all the questions are the same.. they could have essentially made the whole thing two questions:
1) are you empathetic
2) are you _NOT_ empathetic
Personally I think people are just as self centered now as always and we've just gotten better (supposedly) at measuring it.
It's like how mental illness would appear to be on the rise. It could be legitimate change, or it could be that we've come up with fancy names for kids who back in the day would've just been called "a little slow" and/or ended up in a job where no one would notice.
I see this around me all the time. Mind you, I am still young -31- and yet I can see the youngsters around me (and not only the youngsters, people of all ages seem to be affected) just don't care about anything or anyone anymore. I am not surprised by this either. Look at what great examples we have given this next generation. The lies about WMD, the lies about drugs, people telling you that is perfectly normal to own a gun, that it is normal to shoot at someone just for trespassing/burglary. That is cool to join the army and fuck up another sorry son of a bitch that you had absolutely no conflict with. We are teaching our children to be selfish... The people who are selfish are the people that drive the ferrari's around at wallstreet. They are being held up as icons by a complete generation. We are teaching our kids to become like them... No I am not surprised. Just very worried.
you (the west) hold up crack dealers and gangsters as heroes (50cent et al), corporate psychopaths are held up as examples of "successful business leaders" and have TV shows (the apprentice) where people are expected to emulate these leaders in "ruthless business decisions", where kids see a class of people rip off their savings and retirements (bankers) and have 0 consequences, where a celebrity class are held up as models of behaviour where you dont work but shop on your working husbands/wifes credit cards or your rich dads inheritance
and you are surprised there is less empathy ?
i'm surprised there are no fucking lynch mobs
I'd argue that one of the "poisons" of modern society is all the garbage where "nobody loses". We have contests in school these days where everyone wins a prize.... Instead of coming in "last" and "losing", you get a 4th. or 5th. place ribbon. Instead of letting people score poorly on tests, you've got people trying to change the scores around. And instead of "hurting someone's feelings" - there's this whole thing of labeling them as having some sort of "disorder", implying they can't help their actions and they need special consideration/treatment.
If this generation is lacking some of THAT empathy, that's a step in the right direction!
Yes, the Puritans left to pray at the altar of Free Market Capitalism, and later settlers came to respect the Self-Determination of the indigenous peoples.
1. I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.
and humbly thought, "How can I possibly feel that way about everyone?" The study is biased.
Qxe4
It is sad to see such an important topic treated like this. The test is practically worthless. It has absolutely no control questions and the structure makes no distinction between what people think of themselves and how they act in real life.
./ers but we are still IT geeks. We can easily spot a mediocre or poorly constructed "test" and there is really no reason to waste our time with something on this level of quality (or lack thereof).
I suspect the majority of people scoring over 50 points are in fact egocentric narcissists who think they are very empathic.
Please. We might be
Yes. Really.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When you haven't ruthlessly focused your education on acquiring a variety of JOB skills that, along with hobbies that help make you employable, expect not to be employed. Your elders made the mistake of telling you is "do your own thing" without warning you that choices have consequences. Your school, like many, may have been more focused on SELLING a degree than fitting clients for work.
What did you study?
I took my lessons from MY elders, the Depression babies who had to scrabble. Life is a shit sandwich, and the more bread you have the less shit you taste. Education is for making MONEY, because without MONEY, you have fewer choices. Hobbies and recreational education are for fun, but don't typically pay the rent. If you can't get a job that fits your education, do any damn thing you have to. Consider skilled trades (I've never met a mechanic who couldn't make a living) instead of pushing paper. (Come to think of it, that's one area where some of your elders screwed you by discouraging manual labor. Mechanics and weldors, for example, can make serious money and are highly mobile.)
Unique and special snowflakes may disregard the above advice, but they are either employed or don't need to be.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
But then they could not measure your annoyance over trivial crap.
It's not a dumb question
The question asks how do you feel. It does not ask about your actions.
To use your example. Two people can see someone is in distress, both look by casually and continue walking.
But the first did it due to lack of strong feelings to the situation or apathy. The second did it because they did feel the person's pain, but came to the conclusion that the best way to help would be to let that person deal with the issue themselves ( aka tough love ).
Although their actions are the same, they should answer the original question differently.
What about Civil Rights, Women's Suffrage movement or Gay rights right now? Women's place in marriage in the past was usually repressive & before Women's Suffrage they didn't even have many basic rights. Religion can create community & it can destroy it. Do something "wrong" in the eyes of the religious and the entire community will hold a grudge. Social clubs usually had a racist & sexist bent to them: no women, no blacks. Families still exist, it's just Betty Crocker was a lie. Your fear of homosexuals has nothing to do with families as many of them are trying to get the rights to marriage to maintain family lifestyle like heterosexuals.
It sounds like you long for "the good ol' days", where white straight males were dominant & "life was good". My Grandma grew-up during the Great Depression, my mom grew up through the late 50s & 60s. Both lives were hard. Life was not squeaky clean back then. It was only squeaky clean for the privileged: white males who made a decent wage - forget being poor, colored, a strong female or gay.
The current situation isn't perfect, but don't act like "the good ol' days" were either.
" Last I checked self-determination and free market capitalism were some of the founding principles of this country ..."
Last time I checked, the Constitution and Bill of Rights made no mention of "free market capitalism". Did I miss the memo?
What I found troubling about the questions was that they conflated "irrationality" with "empathy". I would say I am a very empathetic person, but only where I rationally observe that empathy is warranted. In my mind, "empathy" is quite different from sentimental, irrational refusal to link consequences to earlier actions.
Some of the questions, however, seem to require me to choose between "empathy" and rationality:
What kind of problems? What caused them? Am I allowed to distinguish between, say, George W Bush being unpopular due to his policies and a homeless guy who gets cancer? Am I allowed to think about George W Bush the human being and try to understand how he got where he is and why he acts the way he does without feeling sorry for him because things didn't end too well with his Presidency?
Define "sure". Am I "sure" because I'm an arrogant idiot, or "sure" because I have some powerful evidentiary or logical basis for my conclusion? If it's the latter, then not listening to arguments I know to be wrong doesn't necessarily make me lacking in empathy does it? Is it evidence of "empathy" if I indulge people who hold views I know to be objectively incorrect?
This appears to test whether I am stupid enough to agree with the American mainstream media's concept of "balance" (i.e. there are no facts, just two different opinions which have to be 'balanced' with one another), rather than whether I am empathetic. Am I more "empathetic" if I answer the question "is this building on fire?" with "Let's talk about the two different views on that for a while." rather than "Yes, get the $#%^ out before you get hurt!"
Read Pynchon.
If you're only just noticing then you must have missed most of the last century when 'progressives' took over the US government to the point where even most so-called 'conservatives' today would have been considered far-left a century ago.
And considering that most of the leftists in the US are on the right side of the spectrum compared to the rest of the world, how far right would 'true' conservatives be? I'm trying to wrap my head around the bizarro world that you apparently live in...
I thought the next couple questions were also badly thought out:
Well, yes, sometimes I don't feel sorry. If someone who has hurt others goes to jail or gets hoisted by his/her own petard, then, no, I'm not going to feel too sorry.
This question is even worse:
Protective? I'll probably feel frustrated, instead. I'm hardly likely to be in a position to even protect such a person.
This is so obviously a Liberian socialist bit of propaganda it makes me puke. For one the assumption is that "Feeling sorry for other people having problems" is a unambiguously good thing.
Well, yeah, it sort of is.
Very often peoples problems are self imposed.
Citation needed. And just because Jimmy stuck his hand in the door before he slammed it onto his hand doesn't mean we don't feel sorry for him, even if it was a stupid move that he brought upon himself
Wheres the questions about taking personal responsibility ? "When you see someone having problems do you think about how they may have made bad choices in the past which caused those problems ?" "Do you want to help educate them to make better decisions in their lives ?" No ... everyone with problems is a "Victim", and your supposed to "Feel Sorry" for them or your an unemphatic asshole.
I don't see how that has to do with the survey, though. And if you want to educate someone to make better decisions - eg. that you care and want to help them so that they don't suffer. In such, empathy, the very thing you decry as socialist. If you want to help them, that implies that you feel sorry for them in some fashion.
The whole thing just reeks of new-age "Make everyone feel good about themselves" psychological bullshit. With an under current of liberal socialism.
I'm not entirely sure what making people feel good has to do with liberal socialism. I was under the impression that socialism was a political philosophy that emphasized overall control through the people as a collective, not a "make everyone feel good about themselves" psychological stance. Maybe you might want to connect the dots.
For the record, liberalism is a philosophy in the US that supports regulated capitalism, not socialism.
"You dont feel sorry enough for the Poor !!! Shame on you !!!" The obvious solution to everyone's problems is for us all to feel sorry for them then create massive government structures to hand out to them sympathy dollars so the problem goes away and we can feel sooo warm and fuzzy.
Well, not quite warm and fuzzy. More on the lines of, if we up the lowest common denominator, then we have a better society. We can judge a country based on its rich elites all we want, but if we look at the poverty line then, well, if that has been upped to a reasonable line then we can say we have succeeded in making a good quality of life for all. Then we won't need to feel sorry for anyone, because the collective as succeeded and as a race we have achieved success.
We send that $5/month to help the starving children in Africa so now we can feel all smug and liberal instead of addressing the actual causes of people problems.
Whoa, whoa whoa, so then, you want to say that helping African children is a bad thing? What other kind of problems do we have to deal with that is anything worse than a society that is so poor that they are literally dying of hunger? In a world where we have enough food for everyone in the world, what kind of monster do you have to be to not feel sorry for them at least a little?
That's not anti-socialist, that's sociopath behavior.
Where's my puke bucket,
Indeed.
"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?" -Plato
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
And this is why you're not empathetic. If you felt they deserved to face the consequences, but felt sorry for them about it, then you would have an argument. Think of the father punishing the child: He feels the child needs to be punished in order to learn some lesson, but he feels bad about doing it.
You come off here as bragging about how selfish you are. You sound like one of those crazy libertarian extremists that post on Slashdot all of the time. It's one thing to not want to hear people complain because it's emotionally draining, or you have your own problems to deal with, but to come right out and say you don't care if someone has a bad day simply because it's not extremely unusual for bad days to occur demonstrates pretty clearly that you have little empathy for others.
Also, I hope the irony of your complaining about complainers is not lost on you.
As a professor, I agree with your observation that empathetic behaviors have not changed in the last 20 years. I wonder if real empathy has remained the same or are students today just better at faking it. (Conversely, they could be more empathetic and worse at showing it.)
The relation between the measurement results and the actual trait would need to be established, assuming we could get an objective measure of empathy.
All TFA shows is that student perception of their own empathy, as measured by self-report instruments, has decreased. The "why" is another study.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
OMG. Don't you have any empathy for the poor beans?
Suggesting people eat them.... just.... wow.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It seems GP is thinking recent thought movements are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Sure, social constructs can be abused, and things can get pretty bad when the abuse goes unchecked. Society today is effectively seeing the abuses, thinking that the cause of the abuses are the social constructs themselves, and in an attempt to prevent future abuse, denounce those constructs completely and absolutely. But those constructs do provide certain good, which GP argues gets marginalized and overlooked.
GP argues a more moderate approach, one that may be a little harder and take a little longer to implement, but will maintain the benefits of the old as well as prevent the abuses. But in this day and age of convenience and immediacy, such a thing would never even be considered. And if such a way does get brought up, one side will argue it's not good enough, while the other side will argue it's too much.
In an age where information is so prevalent, thoughtfulness does not seem to have increased, but mindlessness seems to have gotten louder.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The opposition exists because we ask ourselves this: is the government's primary purpose to govern or be a charity organization?
For the more extreme libertarians, the spin goes like this: is the government here to support your freedoms, or forcibly extract property from people to support politically motivated wealth redistribution?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
governments also provide services to those who elect them...the same cannot be said of "Corporations".
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