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Media and the Death of Empathy


teenwatchingtv.jpgA new University of Michigan study reveals some unsettling information: “College kids today are about 40% lower in empathy than their counterparts 20 or 30 years ago,” says lead researcher Sara Konrath.

To reach this conclusion, Konrath and other researchers analyzed data from nearly 14,000 students and combined the results of 72 different studies on American college kids conducted between 1979 and 2009.

They found the biggest drop in empathy occurred after the year 2000, and they have several theories for this—all of which involve entertainment media that have surged in popularity in the last 10 years.

Video games. Americans are exposed to at least three times the amount of media they were 30 years ago, a number that’s influenced by the popularity of video games. Today’s college students grew up with such games, and more and more research suggests that exposure to violent games can numb players to other people’s pain.

Social media. Co-researcher Edward O’Brien says, “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry offline.”

Reality TV. O’Brien also believes that the “hypercompetitive atmosphere and inflated expectations of success, borne of celebrity ‘reality shows,'” creates an environment that inhibits people from listening when others need support. 

Newsweek writer Barbie Nadeau has her own take on empathy’s gradual demise. Writing about Joran van der Sloot, Casey Anthony and Amanda Knox, all twentysomethings who were recently accused or convicted of murder, Nadeau says:

"Stories like van der Sloot's are increasingly common among the current post-teen generation that grew up on reality television and virtual realism. Think of suspected child-killer Casey Anthony and the study-abroad student-murderer Amanda Knox, for instance. Kids in big trouble share the same sense of life without consequence—and an obvious loss of their moral compass—when it comes to the gravity of the accusations against them. It's as if they've been conditioned to believe that life can simply be reset like a video game if things start to go bad. Or maybe that fame—even infamy—is so intoxicating that they just want more."

Airtight cause-and-effect relationships between media and behavior are difficult to prove. But research like this increasingly seems to indicate a measurable, definable connection: Increased media consumption blunts our ability to identify with the painful things other people suffer.