What, Me Care?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-me-care
A recent study finds a decline in empathy among young people in the U.S.
By Jamil Zaki
January 19, 2011
Humans are unlikely to win the animal kingdom's prize for fastest,
strongest or largest, but we are world champions at understanding one
another. This interpersonal prowess is fueled, at least in part, by
empathy: our tendency to care about and share other people's
emotional experiences. Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior and
has long been considered innate. A forthcoming study, however,
challenges this assumption by demonstrating that empathy levels have
been declining over the past 30 years.
The research, led by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan at
Ann Arbor and published online in August in Personality and Social
Psychology Review, found that college students' self-reported empathy
has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10
years. To make matters worse, during this same period students'
self-reported narcissism has reached new heights, according to
research by Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University.
An individual's empathy can be assessed in many ways, but one of the
most popular is simply asking people what they think of themselves.
The Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a well-known questionnaire, taps
empathy by asking whether responders agree to statements such as "I
often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than
me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I
make a decision." People vary a great deal in how empathic they
consider themselves. Moreover, research confirms that the people who
say they are empathic actually demonstrate empathy in discernible
ways, ranging from mimicking others' postures to helping people in
need (for example, offering to take notes for a sick fellow student).
Since the creation of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index in 1979,
tens of thousands of students have filled out this questionnaire
while participating in studies examining everything from neural
responses to others' pain to levels of social conservatism. Konrath
and her colleagues took advantage of this wealth of data by collating
self-reported empathy scores of nearly 14,000 students. She then used
a technique known as cross-temporal meta-analysis to measure whether
scores have changed over the years. The results were startling:
almost 75 percent of students today rate themselves as less empathic
than the average student 30 years ago.
What's to Blame?
This information seems to conflict with studies suggesting that
empathy is a trait people are born with. For example, in a 2007 study
Yale University developmental psychologists found that six-month-old
infants demonstrate an affinity for empathic behavior, preferring
simple dolls they have seen helping others over visually similar
bullies. And investigators at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have shown that even when given
no incentive, toddlers help experimenters and share rewards with
others. Empathic behavior is not confined to humans or even to
primates. In a recent study mice reacted more strongly to painful
stimuli when they saw another mouse suffering, suggesting that they
"share" the pain of their cage mates.
But the new finding that empathy is on the decline indicates that
even when a trait is hardwired, social context can exert a profound
effect, changing even our most basic emotional responses. Precisely
what is sapping young people of their natural impulse to feel for
others remains mysterious, however, because scientists cannot design
a study to evaluate changes that occurred in the past. As Twenge puts
it, "you can't randomly assign people to a generation."
There are theories, however. Konrath cites the increase in social
isolation, which has coincided with the drop in empathy. In the past
30 years Americans have become more likely to live alone and less
likely to join groupsranging from PTAs to political parties to
casual sports teams. Several studies hint that this type of isolation
can take a toll on people's attitudes toward others. Steve Duck of
the University of Iowa has found that socially isolated, as compared
with integrated, individuals evaluate others less generously after
interacting with them, and Kenneth J. Rotenberg of Keele University
in England has shown that lonely people are more likely to take
advantage of others' trust to cheat them in laboratory games.
The types of information we consume have also shifted in recent
decades; specifically, Americans have abandoned reading in droves.
The number of adults who read literature for pleasure sank below 50
percent for the first time ever in the past 10 years, with the
decrease occurring most sharply among college-age adults. And reading
may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year
psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others
demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts
their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also
shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.
Whereas the sources of empathic decline are impossible to pinpoint,
the work of Konrath and Twenge demonstrates that the American
personality is shifting in an ominous direction. Still, we are not
doomed to become a society of self-obsessed loners. Konrath points
out that if life choices can drive empathy down, then making
different choices could nurture it. "The fact that empathy is
declining means that there's more fluidity to it than previously
thought," she says. "It means that empathy can change. It can go up."
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