Will our children have empathy?

University of Michigan researchers say empathy among U.S. college students is at a 30 year low.

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Konrath conducted the meta-analysis, combining the results of 72 different studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009, with U-M graduate student

Edward O’Brien and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing.

Read all of the U-M press release here.

Why? The researchers have some conjectures:

“Many people see the current group of college students — sometimes called ‘Generation Me’ — as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history,” observed Konrath, who is also affiliated with the psychiatry department at the University of Rochester.

“The increase in exposure to media during this time period could be one factor,” she said. “Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much nonwork-related information. In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games. And a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

Exposure to an increasingly hypercompetitive social environment might also contribute towards the apparent trend, the authors noted, as could a shift towards maintaining friendships online through social media sites, given that the ability to “tune out” and not respond when conversing online could translate into a learned behavior that in turn gets expressed face-to-face.

I’m skeptical that empathy is down. If anything I suspect today’s college students are simply more honest about whether they are empathetic or not. Especially in an anonymous setting.

Take the empathy test here. It’s a brief quiz. At the end you’ll see your empathy score compared today’s college students. If you don’t like the results, take the test over again.

Want to be more emphathetic? Here’s how.