Recent research has suggested that today's college students are not as empathetic as the students of the 80's and 90's. We are actually about 40 percent lower in empathy than people that went to college 20 or 30 years ago. Why is this?
The answer may just be the thing we love best. Technology especially the internet. It makes me wonder if cell phones and text messaging are involved in some way too. To me it is very validating to have someone respond immediately to me. The internet may be creating a generation of narcissistic people which to me is very scary. With this in mind do you think all of our humanitarian efforts such as ending world hunger is realistic at all?
i think this is a very interesting and controversial topic. i think while there are some people who fit this description and maybe more in our generation than previous ones but there is still always people who do not fit the generalization and are willing to work for the good-of-all efforts. i myself am not a self-validating, internet, cellphone junkie. one other explanation for the increase in narcissism in our generation my have nothing to do with technology. in my general psych class this topic actually came up and we talked about the cause of it being an increase in self-esteem. when our generation was being raised there was a belief that self-esteem was incredibly important to human interaction and the parenting style changed to increase self-esteem, since then this theory has been debunked and it has actually been shown that the high self-esteem our parents where instilling can lead to narcissistic behavior. I think your topic makes for an interesting alternative explanation for the rise in narcissistic behavior and i am interested in reading more :)
ReplyDeleteI think you can't really generalize about anything. I could definitely see there being a correlation between increased technology and selfish tendencies, but I definitely don't think there's a causal effect. A lot of other factors in today's society could account for the shift in values.
ReplyDeleteI think that people who make these generalizations are only looking at the people from wherever they are from. People are different so therefore generalization of one thing will be different in another area.
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