Thread: Are the hearts of people growing colder?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37399539/ns ... -behavior/

Today's college kids lack empathy
Compared to 30 years ago, it's all about me now, study finds

By Jeanna Bryner

updated 8:55 a.m. PT, Fri., May 28, 2010

College students today are less likely to "get" the emotions of others than their counterparts 20 and 30 years ago, a new review study suggests.

Specifically, today's students scored 40 percent lower on a measure of empathy than their elders did.

The findings are based on a review of 72 studies of 14,000 American college students overall conducted between 1979 and 2009.

"We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000," said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

The study was presented this week at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Boston.

Is "generation me" all about me?
Compared with college students of the late 1970s, current students are less likely to agree with statements such as "I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective," and "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."

"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," said Konrath, who is also affiliated with the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry.

Are today's young people really more self-centered? Konrath's colleague graduate student Edward O'Brien added, "It's not surprising that this growing emphasis on the self is accompanied by a corresponding devaluation of others.â€

People are just sick of being LIED to by the media and the federal government.
Kids are smart enough to see whats going on when it gets their attention. As a matter of fact they can pop on the PC and just google anything they want to to get enlightened. It can be quite a downer to see that your own media and government are complicit in dismantling your country using the lies and misinformation they spread.

"Oh yeah, I served in Vietnam for 5 years, ayuk" says random idiot politician A...pfffft
"Oy, what I meant was, I was doing something DURING Vietnam that was kind of interesting. Yeah, thats it" says random idiot politician A again.