Empathy and food stamps

“Researchers at the University of Michigan, in a 2010 study, found that American college students are 48 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979, with a sharper dip--61 percent--having occurred in the past decade.”  That’s a quote from a speech by  Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.  You can find a reprint of the speech in the August issue of Harper’s.  

Kingwell is making the point that although we are more networked than ever, we seem to be growing less empathetic.

My gut feeling tells me that there is something wrong with the study.  I cannot imagine a group of teens and twenty-year-olds voting large sums of money to rich agribusinesses while cutting off food stamps for the poor.  I can’t imagine that same group denying a path to citizenship to immigrant workers while spending millions of dollars on fences and drones.  Do you really think a group of nine people of that age would scrap the Voting Rights Act?  Would younger men deny women the right to determine their own reproductive health or tell a gay couple they couldn’t marry?  

It is pretty obvious that old white men are the people lacking empathy.  The amount of cruelty in the the Supreme Court, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and in the state legislatures is astounding.  There are some really nasty people out there.  They are not college students.