21st Century Youth Care Less About Others

A lot of media hype has suggested that the current generation of young people is remarkably self-centered. If you’re tempted to think that’s just old folks being crotchety, you might want to think again.

According to a large new study of college students, concern for others among college students has dropped 40 percent over the last 30 years, with the steepest decline occurring since 2000. The study was reported by Professor Sara Konrath of the University of Michigan at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, held in Boston, Massachusetts.

Psychologists still debate about precisely how to define empathy. For the purposes of this study, Dr. Konrath and her colleagues identified and studied four dimensions of empathy. The first two are considered most central to the concept of empathy: (1) sympathy with others in misfortune and (2) perspective taking, which means the habit of trying to imagine the point of view of another person. The other two factors studied were fantasy, or the habit of identifying with fictional characters, and personal distress, that is, feeling bad when watching someone else having trouble.

The study tracked attitudes of college students from 1980 through 2010. Over that period of time, concern for others has steadily declined. Students today score 48% lower on measures of sympathy than students in 1980 did and 34% lower in perspective taking.

These results are particularly striking because these are the kinds of questions on which people typically over-report their socially valued feelings and behaviors. Most people feel social pressure to say they agree with statements like “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” So a steep decline in college students’ positive responses to these statements suggests a serious shift in social values.

The authors have not identified the causes of these alarming trends. They speculate that phenomenon that have been widely associated with these generation, like technological mediation of social life, video games, and reality TV may have fostered a me-first attitude. As these young people move into leadership roles, the effects of their decreased interest in others remains to be seen.