Wandering from our physical and conceptual homes would battle indifference and improve empathy among people. An improvement is indeed necessary. Researcher Sara Konrath (2010) analyzed 72 studies focusing on empathy among 14,000 college students throughout the past 30 years and found empathy is on the decline. She noted a drastic dip in empathy in 2000.
According to Konrath, college students are 40% less empathetic than those in the 1980s and 1990s.
This is shocking, but not surprising. Consider the changes occurring in the world around this time. In America alone, the year 2000 is sandwiched between the Columbine school shooting in 1999 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Violence took over the news, and today it shadows both our physical and conceptual homes. Even in relatively safe areas, violence still imposes itself through media. Psychologist Tim Elmore (2012) blames the lack of empathy on an overload of screen time, and therefore information, which desensitizes people. Violent video games and YouTube provide a private stage to play out the most callous experiences, minus the consequences.
As a teacher, I hear my middle school students discuss violence the same way they discuss video games. When discussing 9/11, one student proclaimed, “The terrorists won because they took out a bunch of people.” Another student said the same thing about Hitler. When discussing Columbine, they scoffed at the minuscule number killed: “Thirteen? That’s nothing.” One student even admitted he “kind of hopes” for a shooting at our school because it would be exciting.
Biasedly, I started to believe this generation feels at home in brutality and indifference, that they’re numb to the downward spiral we’re perpetually spinning into.
My faith in young people was restored when the organization “Rachel’s Challenge” put on an assembly at my school. During the presentation, students learned about the first victim of the Columbine shooting, Rachel Scott, who impressed others with her selflessness. Because of how she lived her life, the organization challenges people to create a chain of kindness and realize the positive impact they can have on the world.
By the finale, those same students who showed little empathy when talking about statistics were crying freely in the auditorium. She was no longer one of the thirteen. She was Rachel.
My students finally stepped out of their conceptual homes, which often seem detached and thickly barricaded, and I realized my bias against this generation was faulty.
In a world of bad news shared on a continuous loop, it’s natural for humans to build up their mental defense system.
Unfortunately, this often reduces people to little more than a number, color, or image on the other side of a screen. Our technology has convinced us to quietly close our doors, open our computers, and “be social.” People are often more in tune with electronic devices than with one another, but that’s because it’s easier to take in all the negative information thrown at us if we’re apathetic instead of empathetic.
However, just like people, technology is dichotomic: both positive and negative. It’s how we use it that matters. We should utilize these devices as tools for researching places, people, and topics outside our conceptual homes. Instead, they’ve become addictive distractions. We must always strive to be critical thinkers, but especially in the constant stream of media that flows through our eyes and ears each day. As the previous winner of the Nine Dots Prize, James Williams (2018), pointed out, product designers and strategists don’t create technological devices with a humanitarian component in mind. They’re striving to keep our attention, to make money, and are not concerned with creating respect and empathy among people. That job is left to us.
How do we amend the current mindset? The first step is tracing how we’ve arrived at this juncture and then facing our current reality. The second step is really a hundred steps, but let’s start by thinking outside our homes. Outside our screens.
