In a study of 14,000 college students over 30 years, University of Michigan researcher Sara Konrath found that today’s students are much less empathetic than students were back in the ‘70s.
Today, fewer students try to walk in another human being’s shoes or say they have concerned feelings for people less fortunate than they are.
According to Konrath, the biggest drop in empathy came in 2000, but empathy has continued to decline.
The article about empathy jumped out at me, because I deal daily with students and am always interested in studies that fail to take things like racial differences into account. Do African-American students lack empathy as much as their white counterparts do?
I’d have to say that these students, often called “millennial,” are a new breed. Some of them have a sense of entitlement that is amazing. At the same time, when I look at the Bennett campus and the many things that students have done for others this semester (including fundraisers for Haiti, mentoring with younger students, and hundreds of hours of community service), I’d have to meditate on the ways that empathy is balanced with entitlement.
If Konrath surveyed adults, would they look so different from college students? What if she were to survey the members of the United States Congress? I am struck by the number who are able to do nothing in the face of crushing social and economic problems.
Perhaps they have selective empathy – empathy, for example, for bankers and Wall Street, but much less empathy for the people battered by these institutions.
After massive bailouts of banking and other industries, Congress just passed an extremely modest piece of employment legislation. Why so modest? All of a sudden, there are members of Congress who are paying attention to balanced budgets and insisting on “pay as you go” new legislation. Nobody was talking about “pay go” when banks were getting bailed out.
Empathy?
The unfortunate fact is that people are both more and less connected to each other than ever. The media and technology connect us more – we are twitted, facebooked, and myspaced up to our earlobes. At the same time, the wealth of these connections may lead to our disconnection. Now, communication is so easy that it maybe doesn’t happen.
The University of Michigan study focuses on college students, but all of us could ask if we are less empathetic than we used to be.
Julianne Malveaux is president of Bennett College for Women.