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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.
The guy who wrote Beating the College Bubble says that the cost of college debt is so high, everyone should feel empathy for the students, not demand empathy from them. I agree. (For a Slashdot review, read this .)
I don't give a rat's ass about what college kids feel!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Subject one contains 160 milliempathetals, while subject two's milliempathetals measure only 96.
No, that's not a scientific opinion. But it is my opinion.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
I'm not taking that test. Fuck you. I've got better things to do with my time. How'd I do? D'oh! Points off for asking. Not that it matters.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You know, after hearing this, I felt the need to write extensively about the subject on facebook, so everyone can see what I feel.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
37.1% 26/70 - I need to work on this, it is about 30.1 percent too high for my liking.
You can't handle the truth.
Somebody Else' Problem.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
Also, the test is broken. You still receive a point for the lowest option, so the minimum score is 20%. This is why psych majors need to take more math.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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
People were self-centered before, and is self-centered now. The fortunate few who work with spiritual / humanistic matters, are the lucky few to reap most benefits off empathy, helping their fellow neighbours in the process as well as uplifting their own spirit.
However, the environment is much different now. Many people are today free to chose whatever they want. The resources and assistance is available everywhere.
When life is HARD, you will see a big rise in empathy..
This will never be modded up though, due to the retarded system that hides posts. So most people will never actually get this in this lifetime..
So am I the only one noticing the growing trend to vilify capitalism and individualism in this country? Last I checked self-determination and free market capitalism were some of the founding principles of this country, yet I'm increasingly seeing these traits being blamed for all of society's problems. I find this highly disturbing, along with the disappearance of a major political party interested in smaller, less pervasive government.
.technomancer
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!
These sorts of tests/surveys are pretty useless. Unlike something like the MMPI, which is difficult at best to game, the linked survey is very transparent; you can answer it specifically to get the results you want. That being said it seems that especially since the world economy took it's drastic downturn the world in general has become (for lack of a better term) a more evil place, overall; when times are good and there is plenty for all, it's easy to "pretend" to be not-evil. When the going gets rough, you find out what people are really like beneath the surface.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
5. When I see someone being treated unfairly, I SOMETIMES don't feel very much pity for them.
Sometimes! Of course sometimes! If i've had a terrible day and if the person being treated unfairly is my boss who takes every opportunity he can to insult criticize and put everyone else down and who we therefore bully relentlessly.. then yes SOMETIMES i don't feel much pitty. If you treat people like crap they'll do the same to you.
even with all those silly adverbs 84.3% I got. I cry when I watch the news and if I see a talk show that mentions a family that lost their baby (for example) I find it difficult to get up the next day i feel so sad. I still wouldn't trade it for a stone heart because then I'd run around drawing Mohammad and insulting people I didn't know and adding to the amount of pain and anger and suffering in the world. I can't do too much good or benifit but i can do my best not to make things any worse.
it's under construction
None of the questions have any surrounding context that would add or subtract from any feelings of empathy I may or may not have. Whether I (or anyone else, for that matter) feels empathy towards a subject depends greatly on the circumstances. Do I feel empathy towards the folks being impacted by the gulf oil spill? Sure. Why? Because their way of life is being altered in ways we can't even begin to measure through no fault of their own. Do I feel empathy for a guy who burned himself to a crisp because he was too realize he shouldn't smoke while fueling his Prius? Very little, actually. Don't do stupid shit ya dumbass!
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
OK, while I can imagine a lot of reasons why the current generation of college kids might be less empathetic than 20 years ago*, this is not a good way to measure that. For all the researchers know, students are just more self-aware and self-critical today than they were 20 years ago. In some ways, getting a high score might be more likely to say that you're less empathetic and just oblivious to your callousness.
* This isn't my experience, though. I feel, as a college professor, like my students behave just as empathetically towards each other as we did 15 years ago.
I'm tired of these types of studies that are done on a narrow population. Michigan is a dying state. The rust belt is moving into irrelevance, and thusly the inhabitants may feel competitive. These college surveys are not necessarilly representative of the nation as a whole.
I took the quiz, but when I realized how stupid and biased it was, I quit answering and clicked the button at the bottom. Unsurprisingly, I got a really low score. I'm willing to bet that plenty of participants didn't answer all the questions, and that skewed the results.
Mark Shuttleworth's fault, obviously. Empathy is simply not ready. They should have kept Pidgin as the default choice.
I come off as not empathetic... however, I try very hard to see everything from everyone's point of view, I try to see all sides and be in someone else shoes before making any judgement. However, people do a lot of stupid stuff and I believe that they deserve the consequences for doing said stupid things. I may see *why* they did that stupid thing and try understand their motivation, but not sorry for them when they face the consequences. I expect people to view me the same way when I do stupid things. Life also is not fair, people bitching that things go wrong all the time for them (even if it clearly not their fault or when things aren't really that bad) are speaking to the choir... we all go thru that shit, suck it up and try to see the good days (or at least the "not bad" days). The bad days are frustrating, we get it... we don't want to hear it all the time :)
Isn't this one we can pretty much all agree is /b/'s fault?
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...
Why should I feel sorry for them? I have no empathy for them whatsoever!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I scored:
*In the bottom/least-empathetic quintile.
*In the 2nd quintile.
*In the 3rd quintile.
*In the 4th quintile.
*In the top/most-empathetic quintile.
*What do you care?
*None of your business, now get off my lawn!
*I don't know yet, I paid CowboyNeal to take the test for me.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So is social justice! Anything but the prosperity gospel and conservapedia is slavery and is therefore against the founding fathers!!!!1!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
For instance question 12 rates you very low on empathy if you don't agree that questions have only two
possibilities.
12. I believe that there are two sides to every question and try to look at them both.
If you believe that questions have many possible answers and you need to weigh those answers
then you will score low on that question. So looking at a wider view actually makes you less
empathetic on their test.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
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."
Are you saying that it was discovered now that people are more centered? I read Slashdot's comments almost everyday.
Take question 2, "Sometimes I don't feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems."
This is a true or false statement, with "fudge room" only on what "sometimes" and "very sorry" mean.
If you've unambiguously felt very sorry for other people when they were having problems at least a handful of times the recent past then it's a true statement. If you haven't felt this way at all in the past, it's a false statement. If you aren't sure or you've only done it less than a handful of times, then you are one of the few who can pick anything but "Does not describe me well" or "Describes me very well."
A better wording would be:
I feel very sorry for other people when I know they are having problems:
*Rarely or never
*Occasionally but nowhere near half the time
*About half of the time
*A lot more than half the time
*Almost always or always
Other questions have similar "extreme-answer-likely problems" for those of us who take questions like this literally rather than trying to read the mind of the person writing the questions.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You eat, or you get eaten, etc. Will get even worse as Europe goes bankrupt, and the US brings about the next big war. Give it another 20 months, give or take, and you'll see.
I find your comments about tearing down social constructs without constructing replacements as a little odd. Each individual lives life only once. It is meaningless to say that we have not constructed replacements for religious community, when any other community that the person experiences is just as legitimate for them as the one their parents enjoyed. Likewise with the family; if a child grows up with two male parents, for that child it is just as normal as a nuclear family. Why does any replacement need to be an institution that is 'lasting' beyond the lives of the people it exists to serve? If you have been living under a rock recently, there's been a lot of progress going on in microculture development both online and off. Exciting things are a foot for those who take the time to find and involve themselves in them.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Who cares?
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
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.
Damn I wish I had mod points.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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. Very often peoples problems are self imposed. 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.
The whole thing just reeks of new-age "Make everyone feel good about themselves" psychological bullshit. With an under current of liberal socialism.
Your obviously supposed to feel bad about yourself if you don't score high on this test. That way the government can control you by labeling every socialiast agenda as an empathy issue. "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.
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.
Where's my puke bucket,
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Socrates#Misattributions
It said my score was 43. Now, I feel I'm a fairly empathetic person, and I do try to be even-handed (which doesn't mean "there's two sides to every issue", what kind of stupid question was that?) but even-handedness does not imply empathy, and can often work against it.
Reading several questions, I got the feeling a lot of people would think "yeah, yeah, I'm a good guy, I'm like that", when in fact they aren't. I have no evidence of this bias if it exists, but that'd be my guess for how so many people scored as high or higher than 51.
And I don't care if you don't.
we laugh at this slapstick type stuff because nobody got very hurt (much, most of the time)
i would put bets that folks that could pull off WHY SO SERIOUS during a real disaster are say 1 in 200,000 worldwide (which means that The Joker has roughly 29 "friends")
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I cant keep up with the changing of dos and do nots every other question, its more a reading comprehension gotcha quiz, half the time i answer the opposite and have to change my answer and then i get confused and ask for help.
"Sometimes you probably do not feel non empathetic towards a person who is not having a bad life."
whaHUH? Which is it. i dont know. Everyone sucks and fuck your test. I think?
You can Sympathy from folks, but unless you've been there, you can't empathize with someone. A lesson I learned many years ago when my mother died when I was a teen. Got plenty of Sympathy, but there was only one person that I met in that time who could empathize because she had gone through the same situation. We talked one day a little while after the funeral and something she said then still strikes me now well over a decade later and part of it was her tone. It wasn't the soft and gentle tone you'd think. Her response seemed sort of cold at the time. "It sucks. Nothing said is going to change that no matter how much you want someone to say some magic words and it will be better. But there isn't. There is a hole in your heart. It does gets smaller as time goes on, but it never goes away." I guess cold isn't the right word...it was more like sobering. Especially at that age because I was 18 at the time, she was probably 16. And it was the only response I got that looking back today I would call Empathetic.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I consider it to be a great success of progress that allows individuals to rebel against the establishment in a more complete way, as you said, there is not much to care about, but that is a good thing. People used to be more caring because they had to rely upon one another in a close way, obviously we have become successful at removing this part from everyday life and it's a blessing in disguise. Think about all the nonsense that people needed to go through every day just to tend to their biological needs. Now think how the society will change once this is no longer a problem.
Glory of pure mind over matter.
Glory of pure thought over feeling.
Glory of being free from the routine.
This is a new revolutionary step, we have long enough suffered for being born into this biological world, just imagine what it would be like to be a homo sapience once people find a way to become Immortal! The new anti-establishment movements will dominate, what use is a government, what use is any sociological grouping as long as all of the primary needs are satisfied?
That's basically one way to achieve 'communism' (idea of which makes me want to puke BTW) - everyone gets what they need and all work is delegated to the system, endings and beginnings of which nobody knows or understands.
I imagine completely self absorbed individuals, completely anti-social and completely non-caring about the other beings, there will be some code of behavior, of-course, but the society as WE know it will be gone.
WHICH is a great thing, I am all for it and I don't care about keeping the nostalgia of the old ways, the traditions etc. It will belong in a history museum. People will be free from this nonsense to exercise total individualistic search of themselves. What they will come up with may take them to places that are scary or the opposite of that or both.
Don't you wish you could witness that Glorious time?
You can't handle the truth.
Good point regarding our ability to deconstruct. You're absolutely correct that *some* of those constructs need to be pulled apart and examined. How do we go about creating replacements for something that doesn't belong? I don't know about you, but I'd start by dismantling.
If you look at religion, then you'll see a perfect example of a construct that needs to go away. I'm happy to agree with your assessment of its value in people being with people, but that's easy to do without dogma. What's more important right now, is to remove big religion's power in our society. How do we do that? We dismantle it piece by piece (or better) person by person. When we're done with that we can talk about introducing alternatives.
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
I scored pretty high, even though my answers were down the middle on most of the questions (I did not answer at either of the extremes for any of them), and I do not consider myself to be a particularly empathic person. Either the questionnaire is whacked, or we've got a generation of self-centered douchebags on our hands.
(Yes, my student days were well before 2000...)
To me the very things you describe, the universe as a cold random place, where we are alone and not overwatched by some intelligent force, should be all the more reason why we need empathy toward each other. We are all we have got. We are learning this more and more as science moves forward. This knowledge should be leading us down the path of greater consideration toward each other.
That we are not moving in that direction is an issue of leadership. The old moral codes required a delusion of god in order to work. We need a new moral code that does not share this same weekness.
Sometimes I feel sorry for people, sometimes I don't.
Generally, I don't feel sorry for people who cause their own problems. I don't feel sorry for drug addicts. I don't feel sorry for people who can't get a job because they were too busy fucking off at school to learn anything. I don't feel sorry for many classes of people because they do it to themselves.
In Tampa, there is a prime example of this. There is a woman with 12 kids by at least 3 different fathers. She has no job, little education, and literally feels and has stated that society owes her and should be paying her to take care of her kids and providing a place to for them to live, no questions asked. I do not feel sorry for her, and only barely feel sorry for her kids.
I have trouble feeling sorry for my sister and brother-in-law, my own family, because their problems are the result of their own actions.
I know a beautiful, young woman who is in jail because she had to go out at night, while on house arrest for one county and on probation in a different county and with two warrants for failing to appear in court, and drive under the influence with a suspended license. She was arrested and now has to go to court in two counties and may end up in jail for months if not a year or more in prison. She wants to try to bribe a judge to try to get out of some of the charges. I love her, but I do not feel sorry for her because she brought all of this on herself. And, if she gets caught trying to bribe a judge, I still won't feel sorry for her.
People who have genuine problems that weren't caused by their own stupidity or laziness are the people I save my empathy and sympathy for, not people who have done in themselves.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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.
I'm a student, and my empathy is OVER 9000!
"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."
Our Free-Market economy was around 30 years ago. I vaguely remember reading about that sort of economy stretching back into the 18C and 19C, including the "Gilded Age." I would argue that income inequality was also around 30 years ago. What does that really mean? That college kids today don't have as much discretionary income as their peers around 1980 (30 years ago)? I submit these two situations are factors the article wished was the cause.
Child-rearing practices and self-help has changed radically in the past 30 years. It was the 1970s that saw the rise of the dual income among middle-class parents. Children are immediately carted off to day care as soon as the mother can return to work. The family wants that income, needs that income to maintain the house they own so they can be in the school district they want. Of course, two-incomes is a doubled-edged sword; because so many are in this situation, it makes it more difficult to have a comfortable living on one because prices (at least home prices) account for the higher family income.
I've heard at least one woman complain about how she had a child so she could pay somebody else to raise it. In East Europe there are orphanages where kids are not give familial affection or attention and end up sociopaths. Is it any wonder that carting kids to day care has a negative affect on empathy?
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
and mod me funny.
I was convinced that it was going to be some kind of gross "get-off-my-lawn" Republican screed (Kids don't need self esteem! They need to play Cowboys v. Indians outside like the Greatest Generation! The idiot box is destroying their minds!) until I got to the second half where the author blames Ronald Reagan and conservatism for destroying empathy in the millennial generation (!!!). I think that she is not so much liberal as insane.
but Isn't a lack of empathy supposed to be a hallmark of Gen Y?
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/skonrath/files/empathy_decline.pdf
I blame Sally Struthers. You deluge people for years and years and years with the plight of others and demand they feel bad about it (usually in a cynical attempt to obtain donations), and people grow themselves a nice hard shell.
Speaking of lies... ...
What is comparatively new (only a few hundred years old) is (small-l) liberalism, in which minority viewpoints race from vilified, to tolerated, to accepted, to embraced. There is a huge section of adult society that basically worships any cause that claims to be tearing down some other, more established cause--an attitude once expected only of adolescents and madmen. In our race to destroy the trappings of
Of course you are free of bias and have studied the situation.
You are correct.
The Grievance Industry used "empathy" as a wedge to manipulate Americans and gain wealth and power without producing anything or having any particular merit.
Americans are wising up and becoming immune to this form of manipulation. Those who seek victim status are now increasingly looked on with suspicion and mistrust. Too bad for the genuine victims. It probably will lead to a meaner society. I hope the Grievance Industry is happy with the results they've achieved.
I think that there is a balance between having lots of empathy and being caring and getting on with life and not letting everything 'get' to you. Take, for example, a paramedic. If they had a ton of empathy when somebody lost an arm, they might be so freaked out that they would not staunch the flow of blood and save the person's life. You sometimes need to be callous to move forward.
*** Don't be dull.***
You forgot to also call them a bunch of poopy-heads with cooties.
If I'm sure I'm right about something it is because I've already listened to other people's opinions. So I'm not going to listen to them again after I'm sure. Question 11 should be thrown out. And there is usually more than two sides to an issue, so question 12 is bogus and should be thrown out as well.
I find your comments about tearing down social constructs without constructing replacements as a little odd. Each individual lives life only once. It is meaningless to say that we have not constructed replacements for religious community, when any other community that the person experiences is just as legitimate for them as the one their parents enjoyed. Likewise with the family; if a child grows up with two male parents, for that child it is just as normal as a nuclear family. Why does any replacement need to be an institution that is 'lasting' beyond the lives of the people it exists to serve? If you have been living under a rock recently, there's been a lot of progress going on in microculture development both online and off. Exciting things are a foot for those who take the time to find and involve themselves in them.
One thing to keep in mind here is that these social constructs generally had some benefit to most of the members who belonged to the group or observed the custom. You're basically advocating the equivalent of throwing away an old, working car in favor of a newer model. That may well be the right choice for a variety of reasons, but you throw away something that already worked in favor of something else that might not work as well for the purpose. My point here is that institutions shouldn't be thrown away merely because they serve a different group of people than they originally served.
Further, my life is much different than my parents and their parents. I do not experience anything similar to the stable, long term small town environment that all my grandparents enjoyed. Instead I have a sort of semi-nomadic existence where I move from place to place every few years. I do believe I miss something considerable by not having a similar long term social group to associate with.
But I think the problem might lie in conflating *understanding* the point of view of other people with *caring* what their point of view is.
I understand other people's feelings fine. I just don't care about them other than how they directly affect me.
semantics are everything!
I wish you hadn't posted AC. I was trying to post something like this, but my browser lost focus and when I hit the backspace key it took me back to the slashdot main page. Grrr. I think that if this survey reflects the truth, the decline of religion is one of the most plausible causes. Religion creates a sort of blind pseudo-empathy in believers. They typically are not helping people because they genuinely care but because their god gives them no choice. They are just following orders. And the penalty for failing to be kind is eternal suffering in "hell". They are kind because the believe they have a gun to their head. Still, how many of us would question the motives of someone when they are kind to us. When I am in trouble and someone helps me I am deeply touched by that. It may be that they are only being kind because their god tells them to, but I can't help but think that they are better people than those who don't seem to care. Religion encourages a lack of critical thinking skills and irrationality, but it also discourages people from their natural selfishness. That's the price and maybe we are now paying it in terms of people who don't care about each other.
The article mentions the "self help" movement. I have personally noticed a change in child rearing attitudes. Teachers and parents encourage a high self regard in a child as an unqualified good. Regardless of the facts. The result I saw in my own nephew was a determined over-estimation of his abilities. He tended to have a natural belief that he was good at everything and could handle any situation despite the fact that he wasn't particularly good at most things. He would often fail at something he tried again and again even though he each time he strongly believed he would succeed and even that it was "easy". His believe in himself was unwavering. No amount of failure would result in even a little humility in the face of the challenges of the world. In his case that has finally changed somewhat. However, arrogance and over-estimation of ones abilities have become unqualified virtues in our society. Selfishness is more and more considered to be natural and good. It certainly is not considered bad in the way that it used to be.
Another possible source of blame could be the internet. People tend to lose any pretense at being nice when they post on the internet. I can't help but think that people are more cruel towards others on the internet than they are in real life. Perhaps this has started to bleed out of cyberspace into real life or maybe real life and cyberspace are just growing closer.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Wow. Strawman much? I could as easily say that what is comparatively new is (big-C) Conservativism, in which minority viewpoints race from vilified, to tolerated, to accepted, to embraced. There is huge section of adult society that wants so badly to believe in a time not so long ago that was perfect, at least for people like themselves, that they'll stop at nothing to tear down legitimate and beneficial (to themselves and others) change instead of look around and see the world as it is.
*sigh*. Yes - most people have nothing to care about. At all. Nothing. At. All. The vast majority of people care about nothing. It. Is. So. Sad! Why does this platitudinous shit get modded up at Slashdot? I guess because the mods just don't care. About anything. Like *most* other people. Lemme guess, you're what? 18? Early 20's? It is always more complicated. If you think you have it figured out - you're wrong. I suppose that is a bit of platitudinous shit as well. See? Even that is too simple.
I really don't care.
Hey, how's it going?
Holy Donald Campbell, Batman!
That instrument may have a couple of serious issues. I would like to see the data before trusting it.
1. It uses uses a bunch of negative statements that would work better as positive statements with reverse coding.
2. It has an odd number of response categories. (This is somewhat of a religious issue in the field.)
3. Each item is scored a a straight 5-point scale. The assumption that each response is at equal intervals may or may not be true. A Rating Scale Model (1-parameter logistic) would establish the extent to which that is true for each item.
Add to this issues of perception vs. reality (which is a concern with all self-report scales) and you get a practically useless instrument.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Empathy is not a decision we make. It's an unconscious and automatic reaction to someone else's perceived emotional state. Infants display empathy. Empathy is "I feel what you feel." This is different from sympathy, which is "I know how you feel." If you're thinking rationally about whether to feel empathy or not, it's too late and you don't. This can be broken: if you're bad at perceiving emotional states, you may have no reaction or an incongruous one. If you're a sociopath, you may have an intellectual understanding of someone else's feelings and no capacity to feel them. From the other posts in this thread, the survey seems to be partly about measuring this reaction and partly about measuring your desire to act on it. You can control whether you act on the feelings or not. One poster mentioned tough love. Part of what makes it tough is that you have to ignore your instinct to help in service of a larger goal.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
... by Daniel Goleman. It talks about how lacking empathy creates negative situations - and describes it from the ground-up. From the way the brain is structured and how empathy and emotion are linked, to the way it affects communication with co-workers, spouses, and possible disagreements that follow. It details examples of the extremes, where armed robbers, sociopaths, and child molesters are the epitomy of those that lack empathy and emotion, and how that is the pre-cursor to their behaviour. It also talks about how a parent may interact with their child, and that lacking empathy in the early stages of life can lead to issues later.
I'm half-way through and its definitely worth a read. Ironically, it could be classed as one of those books from the apparently "evil" self-help movement.
When one of the questions is "Are you empathetic?" and the answer "yes" results in your being scored as empathetic, the test is, as others have noted, unlikely to provide any insight. The only way this little test works is as a sort of meta-test: if you can't pick a result and get it on the first try, you're not very good at imagining what the person who designed it was thinking.
Just by answering each question by giving the strongest response in what I judged to be the appropriate direction, I was able to score 70/70 on the empathy scale on the very first try. For my second trick, I successfully scored the minimum possible, an angry red 1/5 on each question. I didn't even bother to systematically check my previous friendly green 5/5 answers and reverse them.
For what it's worth, I then made a half-way honest attempt, without any real soul-searching, to pick responses that I felt described me fairly, picking the middle of the scale on the most egregiously ambiguous statements, and I scored bang in the middle: 51/70. I think it's safe to say that the results mean nothing, alas, so I still can't settle the question of whether I'm an android or not.
Mind the Gap
That's a fucking stupid generalization.
Most women don't stay because it's their religion (well, not anymore), they love him or think he'll change. They stay because they're fucking scared of what he might do if they get away, and they fear the cops won't be much of a help. And that fear is completely justified. I know of too many women who showed up dead right after leaving their husbands.
Even if they lock him up for a couple of months, he'll eventually be free, and if you don't have enough money to flee (which many don't, seeing as they have children to take care of), they'll be under a much greater risk.
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How about the "me generation" 80s, which led to more of the same in the 90s? The self-absorbed 70s? The Viet-Nam era 60s? How about the 50s when the N-word was part of polite conversation? How about the 40s when genocide and global domination were in vogue? Maybe we were more empathetic in past centuries, when we had slavery and which burning? Or maybe things were better way back when we had the inquisitions, and the crusades?
I have always had these traits, and while I feel your pain, I don't comfort that much. I can explain it, I can tell whats going to happen next, and I can feel your motivations, I just don't provide the shoulder.
This has worked really well for all sorts of things, but I have never thought that high empathy wasn't self-centered. Just because I can sense what you are feeling, doesn't mean I give a damn.
And yet, that is a pretty good indicator. An empathetic person would be concerned about coming across empathetic.
An narcissist does not care what you think, so long as you think about them.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
i got a perfect score. seriously.
now go fuck off.
- js.
I am not a sociologist, but I'd be interested to see if there's a correlation between loss of empathy and population growth. The old saw about country folk being friendlier than city people has at least some basis in reality because the human brain is trained to ignore (or at least defer) the things it can't immediately process. And by nature you can't be friends with everybody.
At any rate, my feeling is that this can be traced at least in part to the way the U.S. youth's consciousness has been thrust into the world sphere. I know when I was in high school, I basically ignored the news, because everything seemed so distant. Now it seems like something of global urgency or outrage is popping up every other day, and our youth have become active (even if unwilling) participants in it. The whole concept of a biosphere must seem like white noise to a demographic who largely don't even know who they are yet, much less how they want the world to work.
Pidgin is a far better multi-protocol client, imho.
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."
What are the two types of people who traditionally go to college?
A) The kids who's parents pay for everything, so they have no idea how hard life can be (thus less empathetic).
B) Those who worked there way up from nothing. Obviously they/we aren't gonna be very empathetic to people whining about how hard their life is and thus why they never made anything of their life.
Obviously there are other scenarios too, but I think that probably covers the bulk of college kids.
Okay, wild, but stay with me here. Aspartame is a known
neurotoxin (i.e. mildly toxic to brain tissue) and previous studies
have shown that damage
to certain areas of the brain reduces empathy. Personal
experience with two friends who became addicted to diet pop and
suffered significant personality changes including a major loss of
empathy first suggested this. Okay, this is anecdotal
but what's a better theory?
Statements like "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me. " and "I am often quite touched by things that I see happen." are describing acts of sympathy. If you try to feel someone else's feelings that's just sympathy.
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At least here in Norway, which I must admit has experienced an extreme rise in wealth over the last decades due to oil, I would say that by far most people trying to appeal to my empathy in daily life don't deserve it. I'm very fond of our many social securities for the disabled, elderly, unemployed, our socialized health care and pay a pretty penny in taxes without grumbling too much - but the flip side of that is that I know that people are also quite well taken care of. What I get in my daily life is usually obnoxious rom (that's gypsies with a PR touch) beggars who are really organized bands placing them out, protecting their territory and faking their desperation. The same bands who are grossly overrepresented in our criminal statistics by the way, supporting them is supporting organized crime.
To continue on that, I have very little empathy with criminals and very much empathy with victims, when we create what is probably the world's most luxurious prison I feel like puking. Not because I'm in favor of stuffing them in a dark hole with a mud floor, but because I want that money put into police protection and getting more criminals off the streets. Quantity, not quality absolutely does matter in this respect. The punishments in this country is an insult to everyone who has been beaten, mugged, raped or murdered. The money spent is an insult to all those elderly who spent their best years rebuilding after WWII and need help on their elder days and instead we spend it on the people bent on tearing society down instead of building it up.
I'm very much in favor of programs that provide opportunity, like for example here in Norway there is a lot of public higher education and a government sponsored grant/loan institution which means that practically everyone that wants to can take an education. I come from a family that would no doubt have sponsored a college education and a college fund, so quite likely I'm losing money by this being a public system. But at the same time I feel very empathic to children that grow up in less fortunate families or perhaps more egoistic families who don't have that backing. I know it's not fully that black and white in the US either, but your background definitely has much more impact there than here.
What I notice is that in the US there's much stronger opposition to any form of government "empathy" so to speak, Obama would be a right-wing extremist in most European coutries. Everybody should fend for themselves, and if they can't they should beg for private charity. My impression is that both for people and corporations it's whatever position is most opportunistic at the moment though. Here on the other hand the government should provide most of the first and second level of Maslow's pyramid, physiological and safety needs. Maybe it's just because we're richer, but I don't think so because I see the difference in our neighboring countries too which aren't that rich - not richer than the US anyway. I'm not sure whether it's because we're more empathic and just accept this as natural, or more collectivist and figure that deciding it by popular vote is justification enough. Either way, it also lowers the need for personal empathy, I don't give two bucks to a beggar because I give that and much more each day through taxes.
The other big difference is in health care, the US seems very happy to meter our medical punishment for bad lifestyle. While we tax the hell out of alcohol, tobacco and all other sorts of unhealthy things here, we don't ever withhold medical help. Despite being very big on individuality and freedom of life, if you want a band aid either from charity or the government then most seem to think your life should be splayed wide open for inspection to determine if you're worthy. Here there's a different interaction between the health system and patient, trust me the doctors will give you straight talk about what you are doing to your body but we won't play t
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But rejoice, the world is not going as bad as you think it is:
I would agree with you, living in New Zealand, a highly "liveable" country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand#International_rankings
I'm still amazed at how people act. "Oh, the world is out of control, children are out of control, teens are out of control, everything is worse than when i was a kid". And yet, our largest city, where a whopping QUARTER of the population live, is the FOURTH most "liveable" city in the world! (equal to Vancouver) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_most_livable_cities
I say to these people, "You live here in New Zealand, we dont have any major recession, we are not fighting wars overseas or indeed right here at home, what do you have to whine about?". They normally dont know what to say to me! They've been told by the nightly news that the world is a horrible, horrible place!
That said, I do often wonder if the world is closer to A Clockwork Orange than in the past... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange
---
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
tl;dr
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Mmmm mmm, I love that passive-aggression. Not only do you backhand us all with your empathetic rage, but you do it as an anonymous coward. Congratulations on proving the opposite of your point.
My mother is a trained sociologist, so I know making these things are more complicated than meets the eye. But, although I am quite empathetic in a practical sense, I recoiled at some of the wording ("tender feelings", hoo yay). I can't be alone in this, and this would definetly color the survey result?
Emotions! In your brain!
A theory of humor:
Humans have a certain morbid interest in the harm others come to driven by our survival need to learn how others come to harm so as to avoid that harm ourselves. We have a socialization empathy instinct to nurture and protect each other for the common good which conflicts with this need. And yet we have a survival instinct to not let the harm that comes to others impede our own survival activities. All of these motivations have simply provable Darwinian merits.
Females of our species are inclined to select against risk averse males because a lack of daring translated long ago to a lack of interest in exploration that was essential to survival in the face of changing environment, social and climatalogical. The lines of the risk averse men and the women who preferred them died out.
These base instincts between morbid curiosity and nurturing protection conflict, and the interface of the conflict is called humor. We are driven to share our understanding of how others came to harm in memorable ways so that others may learn. The interface is persistent and we're intelligent enough that we can construct hypothetical harm stories against it - these are called "comedy". The advantage of comedy is that we can construct cautionary tales rather than historical ones, and noone need actually come to harm. We enjoy comedy because in it we learn how others come to harm without being harmed ourselves, but the closeness to the harm / empathy interface makes the comedy memorable so the closer it is to that interface, the funnier it is.
Having evolved behavioral norms relating to biological activities like reproduction and excretion in the interest of survival, we employ these concepts and the awkward feeling caused by interacting with the interface of the conflicts of these base instincts to create memes which are memorable and which enforce social norms. In the social sense the individual that is the butt of the joke is "harmed" by becoming less desirable for reproduction within our cultural context.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but if nobody is at least hypothetically harmed, it's not funny. It doesn't approach the harm / nurturing interface that creates the conflict that gives us the "funny" feeling. Sophomoric physical, sexual and toilet humor is all the humor there is. As a proof I invite you to find a "joke" that's "funny" that violates this rule here below. I'm sorry if this post takes some of the mystery and humor out of what was otherwise a quite enjoyable human experience. What is, is.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Wow, I pity your limited view.
Education to me was about enabling me to do what I wanted. Not about money, I could have spent those 4 years that I spent studying working in construction earning a packet, A$20 an hour starting, brickies got $1 a brick and you could lay 600 a day easy, that's A$144,000 ($600 x 5 days a week x 48 working days a year), still over A$100K after tax for a tradie. The thing is I don't want to lay bricks for the rest of my life, I've done manual labour and it's boring as batshit, in the sun and you will go nowhere, it's the same job day in, day out for 47 years.
I worked at getting an education because it let me do what I want. If it was all about money I'd get a well paying job that I hate.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
They're called "gated communities."
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
You're not "busting my bubble". The theory I laid out is based on research noted in the book "The Naked Jape". It explains why people laugh. Your theory doesn't explain why people laugh.
Pretty easy. Puns and other word plays are funny and yet don't come into the categories you listed.
You're not even close. Though seeing you be so confident and yet fail is quite amusing.
Is it only me, or is the page mentioned in the posting down the entire time? Slashdotted right from the beginning...
"You can't gauge discrete groups!" - "Chuck Norris gauges discrete groups as well!" (a colleague)
Relate this to some recent research that, unsurprisingly, proved how racist people are less empathic towards people of other races. Empathy is a vital indicator of many other human characteristics being its premise. I perceive it falling, clearly, in Italy (trust me, I have sufficient experience with young people); but... I cannot honestly tell why it does so sharply. I can point some obvious causes; for instance, the raise of families with a single child. Single children usually too late discover they're not the centre of the world. As for computer gaming, when I was young, I played with my ZX Spectrum and my classmates had it too, or they had the Commodore 64. We played a lot, honestly, so I cannot think of video gaming as an issue.
But there is really one thing that is so evident that I cannot imagine why it so underestimated: I'm talking of the quality of TV series for children. [Living in Italy, I may miss some correct title]. Of course we had some police stuff, but think about "Eight is Enough", "Little House on the Prairie", even "My friend Arnold", though set in the world of rich people, really thaught you something. Families had problems, real problems; I mean, life was hard and shows were close to reality by many aspects, we really suffered of the sufference of figures in the show. Young people in the current TV shows for children live in a sort of colourful, forever-happy world. They get over any (ridiculous) problem in matter of minutes. They cannot acquire our children empathy because they are just meant to be happy and funny. I do not know about the USA panorama, but it is very difficult in Italy to make young people watch some TV show that really can tell them something.
Sorry, but there is a HUGE difference between COMEDY pain and HORROR pain.
I hate to break it to you, but Will E. Coyote is NOT real. Yeah yeah, I ruined your innocent child like look on the world with this but I don't care. Guess the story is right about one thing.
But if you can't see a difference between these old cartoons and the Saw horror series then you are either a person who thinks extreme graphic violence is funny or you feel way to much empathy for a cartoon character.
But you are a classic example of the story here. There is an increasing attitude of "fuck everyone else" in this world. It is perhaps a natural up and down motion in society, but they can lead to extremes.
There is a saying "If you are not a socialist when young, you don't have a heart. If you are not a capitalist when you are old, then you no money". It makes sense, but what if people already are selfish assholes when they are young? They are hardly going to get nicer as they get older. Could be a very selfish society in 30-40 years.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
First, it's *even f they lock him up*. It's not certain.
And if he gets locked up and then reappears, and he's not a threat (shows up at her door or something, but not violent), shooting him will cause problems for her. You can't shoot people even if they were abusing you in the past. If he gets violent, there will probably struggle up close, with bad odds for her.
Oh, no, I'm not forgetting, I know it very well, unfortunately.
But while that may be the right thing most of the times, the decision is *not* easy as you claim. Yes, staying is hell. Leaving may be worse. Claiming it's her fault and she is mentally unstable is idiotic.
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Empathy is something biological that happens when you see another human being in distress; the brains of most people are hardwired for it. You can measure it physiologically, you don't need to ask people questions about it. I doubt that has changed much today.
What they actually tested wasn't empathy, but instead responses to some vague questions. The changes in the responses to those questions probably have more to do with people being more honest and seeing through the bullshit of psychological questionnaires than any changes in empathy.
I know empathy. I'm pretty good at reading others' feelings, motives, seeing their viewpoint.
I just don't let it rule me, prioritizing logic over empathy.
I see people's righteous wrath about some "injustice" but I see their harm comes as result of their prior shortsightedness and greed. Picking the "cheapest" solution, like building houses on terrains that are regularly flooded then crying for help when the flood comes. I see people who ask me for help over the same thing over and again, but refuse to let me teach them how to do this themselves. People who complain that "somebody do something about" while they, themselves are in the best position to do it.
I understand their feelings pretty well. I just don't feel for them the least bit. "Aid for victims of flood" usually means if I didn't buy a plasma TV because I paid insurance instead, I will be funding a new plasma TV to a victim of flood who lost one and was not insured. Fuck them.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
You gave some examples and reasons that reeked of hyperbole and sounded like they mirrored your own point of view. If you have better examples then please share them.
Last I checked churches, families & social clubs still exist & aren't going anywhere. To suggest that these should not evolve with society or that society can't find community without a church or a 'good ole boys club' is ludicrous.
We've seen considerable cultural shift through the dissemination of the "greed is good" ideal : Ayn Rand's fiction and "philosophical" writing represents one important faction. There has been the blowback against socialism known as Thatcherism. The most insidious however has been the economists deciding that a business' sole duty was to maximize shareholder wealth.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
However, if you think there is any "you" to discover without reference to other people, you are sadly mistaken.
- you are omitting a possibility of communicating with people over the new communication channels, which provides levels of communication necessary for development, while reduces the imposition of the opposite side as that of an actual real biological entity.
I am talking about communication without physical contact obviously. For immortal (or very long lived) creatures this may be the way it will work, in fact it seems that it is a necessity to exclude oneself from the biological contact with others in order to achieve greater lifespan.
All that I am proposing here is that we do not know what possibilities will open in front of people in that environment.
You can't handle the truth.
I do see, in every day life, younger people being less empathic than my or older generations. They seem to be way more narcissistic than older people. Their conversations are usually limited to what they do, without taking into account what the other person says. They tend to participate in movements, as one poster says in this forum, but they do it more because it's the cool thing to do and less because they were moved by something and felt in their hearts that they need to do it. The young people's lack of empathy and apathy is directly reflected to the new music, which is totally apathetic like its audience.
The big question is not if kids are apathetic. The big question is who and what drove those kids to be apathetic? Could it be the society we, grown ups, are delivering to them? could it be that the society full of pain and greed is what drives them in apathy?
In my opinion, the answer is a big YES. We, adults and older people, are in a race for money and power. We have a big lack of morals (generally speaking). We are deeply corrupted, even if we have more empathy then these younger people. We are the owners of the media (we as in collectively us middle aged adults), we prefer to push artists that promote apathy, because it suits us, because it makes people apathetic, couch potatoes, unable to think for themselves. We are the ones that promote the blatant moral hypocrisy that is 'think about the children', we are the ones that we are doing endless wars, we are the ones that we have money as our god.
It's no surprise then that the young people are apathetic. They don't want to live in the inhuman world we have prepared for them. They don't have other weapons in their hands other than apathy, really. Because they need to survive in this dark and grim world of ours.
... so why should I care?
No left turn unstoned.
How in hell can the average be 51? How many of these people suffer from depression and stomach ulcers? Let it go. You can't save or care about everyone.
I thin you may be on to something, though probably not in the way you think.
One thing I remember from my brief interest in anthropology is that people don't answer polls about themselves according to what they are, but to what they'd like to be, and/or what is more socially acceptable to be. E.g., a tribe who traditionally glorified the role of hunter and warrior answered mostly that yeah, they still are hunters and warriors, although they were an agrarian society in the meantime and most didn't even have weapons any more.
It's not that they lie, and most aren't even aware that they're lying. People just like to thin of themselves as an idealized self, which usually means one more acceptable to the group.
The poll companies discovered even more problems there. For a start, if the phrasing gives any hint as to what you'd think of who picks option B, it will influence what people answer. Then there's the fact that most people pick the "yes" choice, presumably because usually when asking a "yes"/"no" question, most people really expect a "yes" answer. So a poll asking everyone "should we stop the war?" will paint a different picture than one asking everyone "should we continue the war?" Then in multi-choice questions there's a bias to pick the first one.
The poll companies by now figured out how to deal with that, by randomizing the order of choices and phrasing. But an online "diagnose yourself" piece of BS typically won't. And it's trivial to make one which uses the above lessons to skew the results towards whatever result you wish to get.
But even those factors boil down to what answers would make one more acceptable to the interlocutor in a casual conversation. People don't tell the truth, they tell what they think the other would like to hear.
And to finally get to the point, I think you may be on to something there in that way. If it seems more socially acceptable to be a sociopath (and there seems to be no shortage of apologists for that in the USA, corporate or otherwise), and the questions are transparent enough to guess which answer means which, most people will answer as if they were sociopaths.
But that doesn't necessarily say what they _are_. Just what's their image of what is a better answer.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Regarding Test 1 (posted test of the article)
My result was: 56 of 70
Which is about higher empathy than 70% of the participants.
Regarding Test 2
Here, http://glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/EmpathyQuotient/EmpathyQuotient.aspx
My result was: 25 of 80
Which makes me about empathetically retarded, or something, nearly autistic.
- So, yeah, if the first test is any good;
Slashdot probably dragged it down humungously well.
When I found out I had to enable Javascript to get a simple web form scored, I couldn't be arsed to give enough of a fuck how empathetic I am to turn it on. Too bad they didn't care enough to assemble a sensible website... apathy's a bitch, but no one seems to care
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So if you think that *every* question has two sides, you're an idiot, because a.) plenty have less and plenty have more, and b.) because questions don't have "sides" to begin with.
I for one have no empathy for people conducting such tests. They should be harvested for organs before they waste more money and time =)
How, exactly, do they quantify one's level of empathy? Seems like, "slow news day" blended with, "pseudoscience we can sensationalize."
Garbage.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
A major flaw of the "gated community" concept that all of these would-be-John-Galts are building is that they seem to have no provision for growing their own food and depend entirely on external food supply.... not very siege worthy if you ask me.
If you don't understand it you are just as much a pathetic shithead as that other poster with his shithead question.
Holy Thundering Egos, Batman!
I offered you a reasonable post aimed directly on the level with every intention of discussing some interesting things with another sentient being who I was taking seriously and was open to insights from after sharing my own. Basically, I assumed you were a reasonable person.
You're not. You're actually more than a little bit insane. The final, disgusting line in your previous post was an indicator or that, but I chose to give you the benefit of the doubt. You clearly didn't deserve it, so thanks for clearing that up.
Bye now.
-FL
Wow. You're really full of yourself. huh? You've studied, this. You're married to someone who write books. Appeal to authority is not a valid argumentative technique. And as a JD, you know this.
If you understand that things are complicated, why bother writing such simplistic pabulum then? Calculated hyperbole? No - just crap and you know it. Trying to sound smart and knowledgeable, that's all. I've read Persig, I've read Stanley Fish. If you think there are only two sides to the issue, you must be doing something wrong.
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I can tell this is simply appeal-to-authority as you don't state what the book is. I'm guessing it's this one:
http://www.aprilynnepike.com/Wings , a Young Adult novel about real-life fairies. Not exactly a heavyweight. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you. I like a good young adult novel as much as anyone.
But pimping your wife's book on Slashdot to bolster your own ego? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?
Ha! I haven't seen the capitial-Q quality for a long time. Was your BA in Philosophy on that? Send me your thesis, I'd love to read it.
I think you see things as black and white, and you dismiss the psychological effect that living in such environment produces.
Real situations aren't that clear, people are not that rational when under pressure and conflicting emotions, not everyone can handle shooting a gun, etc. It's just not that simple.
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The "test" linked in the article does not have privacy settings or agreement. The test is performed by a company whose business seems to be "commercial redirection services". Whatever that means I'll pass.
I don't even live in a big city now, although I lived in a huge city for half my life.
Carrying a rifle around is not hard work. Ask any Texan who lives in the country.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Let's hope the Slashdot crowd doesn't break the empathy counter on the downside."
I expect that we'll get quite a few who not only score low, but come back to the boards boasting of how low they go. Hackers and hacker wannabes by the most part tend to be interested in empathy only in how to use social engineering to manipulate others.
Please review quote:
"In our race to destroy the trappings of tradition and establishment in favor of something shiny and new, we've forgotten to build lasting replacements to those edifices we so gleefully destroy. Religion? Superstitious nonsense--screw "sense of community," it's a pointless side effect. Social clubs? The decadent excess of a dominant class looking for ways to ostracize others. Family? A convenient lie, used mostly to oppress women and marginalize homosexuals, easily entered into and easily dissolved by the courts."
Note none of these institutions are actually in danger of going extinct & no one is at the door clamoring for their destruction. Also note the tone is one of longing and the need to preserve the way these things function or have functioned in the past.
Despite the fact that this is a geek side, this is a pretty insightfull discussion. Think, just reading through made me kind of a better human being .
I have an empathy disorder. I simply can't empathize with people. I don't even really understand what empathy means. When someone tells me about how shit their life is I immediately start outlining ways they could fix the crap that is wrong. A lot of people get upset by this and I don't ever understand why. It's lead to a policy whereby I just don't listen to peoples whining. I've told more than one person, "I'm a problem solver, not a priest. If you want to tell your problems to someone who can't help you go to confession.". I generally stop associating with someone if they complain about something to me, refuse to follow my advice on the issue, then complain about it a second time. Apparently this is not empathetic.
What I want to know, is why the fuck anyone wants to tell all of their problems to someone and then not get any help? If I'm going to tell you that X is wrong, then I expect you to offer a solution. Not just go "Yes, that sucks. You are right." I don't need a second person for that shit.
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Life is a shit sandwich, and the more bread you have the less shit you taste.
I disagree completely with this sentence, but I absolutely love the visual it produces. This is getting used at my next dinner party.
So in the end evolution will go with empathy unless forced against the flow.
I notice sex makes one narcasssistic. That is, the ego just grows on it if not watched.
Watching the bombardment squewing of bad news everywhere... it's too much. I can't be moved by the palestine crying on the TV, the starving african; it's just too much.
Lowering of empathy weakens humanity as a group at every level - from a 1-1 disagreement failing to see the other side to the argument all the way up to world wars.
But hieghtening it leads to sucess. A empathetic, high EQ manager is much more successful than the results driven one. This translates to economics. A community with a church ends up richer than one without, even with the problems involved with that.
So, asking ourselves, where does this stuff come from?
In times past, and for the religious, some might say The Devil!
But that's been worked on now,
so it must be the greys I tell you, The Greys! ;-)
Anyhow. This is a reminder. Every argument has another side to it. Hitler, Jesus. Got to consider both sides.
Empathy makes a group stronger in the immediate and the strongest group wins. Anything else takes constant effort to derail this, like money in a war. But on the other hand is the idea that with people fighting against each other produces a stronger product.
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I'm just stunned that it wouldn't be obvious.
Human beings are social mammals. Like other social mammals, our whole survival strategy is working together towards certain common goals. Our survival strategy is each other. Without each other we would still be lion food in the east African Savannah. We would still be chasing our food with sticks sharpened in fires. While I am glad our modern western societies provide more individualism and individual freedom than societies in the past, some people take it way too far into "I got mine!" territory.
I can go back to not giving a shit about other people and spend all my time looking after my own interests. What a relief!
OK, so people will blindly answer tests in a way that make them sound like good people, therefore the test is fundamentally flawed (assuming I understand your argument correctly). So how does this explain why modern students are answering those questions so differently from students from two to three decades ago? Are modern students more likely to think they are bad people? Are modern students more honest in their self-analysis? Or are they legitimately more sociopathic than students from the past? I don't see how your arguments address any of that.