Stereotypical views on young adults’ lack of empathy spurs study on youth

Young people today are all about instant gratification and the newest technology. Millennials can’t seem to care about anyone but themselves — or so you’d think, if you believed everything written about that age group.

Rebeccah Nelems, a scholar of Sociology and Cultural, Social and Political Thought at the University of Victoria, is about to study just that: how youth today experience empathy. Recently awarded a Pierre Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Fellowship for her work, she hopes her research will help improve empathy-based curriculum and bring the voices of young people to educators.

“We’ve decided empathy is really important,” she says of the explosion of interest around empathy and its effects. “There are all these studies that back that, that show how empathy is positively correlated with all these other socially desirable traits, such as leadership, critical thinking, and business acumen. Some what ironically the second narrative that’s coming out along with that is we feel like we’ve got an empathy deficit. President Obama came out in 2006 saying that the U.S. is suffering from an empathy deficit and this second narrative is really heavily focused on young people.”

Nelems says she finds it fascinating that the lack of empathy in society has been foisted onto young people and is being seen as a generational issue. She says people need to start questioning the society in which young people are being raised that might influence these behaviours.

“If there’s an empathy deficit in our society amongst youth then we have to look at the social values that we are socializing young people into,” says Nelems. “There’s a lot of very competitive, consumerist, individual messages for young people that say you’ve got to look out for yourself, you’ve got to succeed in this world, you’ve got to be competitive for jobs. There’s a lot of things that we need to take a look at and take responsibility for as a society before foisting it off on the ‘young people today’ narrative.”

A recent study done by the Harvard Graduates School of Education helps illustrate Nelems’ idea that competitive and individualistic messaging may water down empathy as a priority in youth. The study asked children to rank the level of importance they placed on achieving success, achieving happiness, and caring for others. An overwhelming 80 per cent picked achieving success or happiness as the goal that was most important to them, while around 20 per cent picked caring for others.

Not caring for others can lead people into mayhem, something Nelems can attest to while spending time in New Orleans in 2009 after Hurricane Katrina. While there, she saw work done with high school students that helped inspire her research on empathy. The students in this area of New Orleans were considered high risk as they were still reeling from the lack of resources and support they received after the hurricane destroyed their homes. Some of these youth had become gang leaders in their schools and were responsible for acts of violence in their community. However, after a period of six weeks in a psycho-social program, Nelems says she noticed astounding changes. Kids who were once gang members became peace-builders in their schools and promoted conflict resolution amongst their classmates.

“I kept thinking about it, and thinking about it, and I realized what it was, it was empathy,” she says about the transformation of the youth in New Orleans. “So for me it became a question of what was this amazing thing that happened to these young kids that was this point of resilience for them in their own lives, but also for their whole community.”

Nelems says more academic articles were published on empathy in 2014 alone than were published cumulatively between 1900 and 1970. She says that internet searches on the topic of empathy have exploded in 2015, already exceeding last year’s search numbers.

“I think what this interest in empathy might be about is the loneliness and lack of connections we experience in a society where we are expected to always compete, self-promote, and look out for ourselves,” she says. “Acting out of self-interest is seen as such a rational way to act in our society. But look where that has gotten us and the planet?”

“A young person recently said to me about Facebook – 'we’ve never had so many friends, and we’ve never been so lonely.’ We know our digital, connected world can be a dehumanizing space. But at the same time, our society is connected more than ever before and that creates enormous opportunities for us to figure this out.”