Young people today are dangerously self-obsessed, over-cosseted and computer-addled – or so the media would have us believe. Recent science stories seem to confirm popular concerns about the feckless brains of Generation Whatever (to use the latest label). But we are not getting the whole story.
On 29 May, British newspapers rushed to report on a study by Sara Konrath, a University of Michigan researcher, showing that current college students are lacking in empathy compared to their predecessors. The study concludes that “college kids today are about 40 per cent lower in empathy”. The biggest fall came after the year 2000 – the advent of mass connectivity – according to the survey of 14,000 personality tests over the past three decades. Konrath says that modern students are far less likely to agree with lines 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”.
Presenting their findings on 27 May, Konrath and her colleague Edward O’Brien told the US Association for Psychological Science that the rise of social media seemed to be a factor: “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems – a behaviour that could carry over offline.” Thus, “many people”, Konrath said, “see the current group of college students as one of the most self-centred, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history”.
It is a popular impression. Not only is Generation Whatever accused of unprecedented selfishness, but we are told that it is getting increasingly stupid. Again, technology is blamed. In June, for example, a Duke University study found that having home computers and broadband lowers students’ scores in reading and maths – particularly if they don’t have the sort of middle-class parents who nag them to lay off the messaging and gaming.
Techy teens
But are these concerns new? “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words . . . and impatient of restraint.” That was the poet Hesiod in the 8th century BC.
The human basics may have changed very little – but that does not make headlines. In March, the British media ignored a University of Western Ontario study of 477,380 high-school seniors in 1976 and 2006, which found that Generation Whatever looks very similar to youth from the mid-1970s. The main difference, said the study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, is that the new generation of young people has higher expectations of its education and is less trustful of government. So perhaps it cares more.
Jeroen Boschma, creative director of the advertising firm Keesie, based in Rotterdam, believes as much. He told the Spanish newspaper El País the story of how he interviewed a 17-year-old for a job and asked him a tough technical question to see how he would react. The candidate did not know the answer, but requested a minute to find out, consulted an online forum and got more than 100 informed responses from across the world.
In 2006, Boschma published the book Generation Einstein: Smarter, Faster and More Socially Aware, to loud media buzz. He believes that rapid-paced technology has imbued these so-called “digital natives” with new qualities: they challenge authority and are highly pragmatic in dealing with information. “This sets them apart from any other generation and has consequences that are by no means trivial.”
Certainly, young people are politically engaged on a scale unseen since the 1960s, thanks to their ability to clamber on to the internet’s global soapbox. For example, when Farouk Olu Aregbe, a recent graduate in the US, set up the One Million Strong for Obama Facebook group, it rapidly gained 820,000 members. And in Britain, pressure from a 5,000-strong Facebook group forced HSBC to stop charging interest on graduates’ overdrafts.
The laptop revolutionaries can also be altruistic. Twitter and Facebook were still primarily driven by college students when these networks overwhelmed the Red Cross with millions of texted $10 gifts to Haitian earthquake relief. Digital networking, far from merely fostering passivity, has created a generation that can engage vigorously and fast. Empathy has not disappeared – it is simply taking different forms.
And it’s not just empathy that is changing. The idea that the human population is developing a different kind of intelligence is another common idea. Studies by James Flynn, a professor of political studies at Otago University, New Zealand, who specialises in measuring intelligence, show a consistent rise in global IQ performance of roughly 3 per cent per decade, in some cases going back to the early 20th century. This implies that, over the past 100 years, the IQs of people (predominantly in the west) have risen by about 30 points, an observation known as the “Flynn effect”.
Flynn believes that our brains have changed in recent decades because TV, computers and social networking challenge the brain in new ways and for far longer periods of time. Those challenges are developing quickly. The plotlines for The Wire are infinitely more complex than those of, say, The Good Life in the 1970s. Games such as Civilization IV re-create human economic and technological history, challenging teens to work out whether they should develop an agrarian capitalist society or a monarchy.
But Flynn argues that his “effect” does not show a genetic increase in intelligence per se. It is the product of a bias in IQ tests towards abstract-reasoning intelligence. Our brains are becoming more creative, but this is perhaps at the cost of older, everyday skills.
This theory is echoed by Gary Small, professor of psychiatry at the University of California Los Angeles and author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. He believes the generation that has grown up using computers is having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though [they] are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he told the New York Times in April.
Such shifts in consciousness are not without peril. Two recently published studies – by the University of California and the University of Southern California – indicate that our constant diet of digital news is beginning to move faster than our ability to make moral judgements. Rapid info-bursts of stabbings, suffering and war are consumed but may not make us indignant, compassionate or inspired.
Yet there is evidence, too, that the human brain is advancing its ability to sift informa-tion quickly. We appear to be evolving rapidly under pressure from unprecedented demands, using evolutionary mechanisms we are just beginning to understand. One is called epigenetics – a frontier science that is revealing how the changes we experience in our brains during our lives do not simply go to the grave with us, but can be passed on to our offspring.
Scientists are also discovering that the brain retains high levels of plasticity throughout our lives, particularly if we keep challenging it with new learning.
Speed-freaks
Tomorrow’s people may already be buzzing away among us. They will include the “supertaskers”. For most of us, multitasking is tough. Trials show that it tends to result in two things done poorly rather than one done well. But one in 40 people appears immune to this problem. These lucky speed-freaks can, for example, drive and talk on a mobile phone at the same time without loss of concentration on either task, according to tests on 200 people by the Utah University psychologist Jason Watson.
Supertaskers constitute only 2.5 per cent of the population, Watson believes. But even that level is surprisingly high. “According to cognitive theory, these individuals ought not to exist,” he says in a paper soon to be published by the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. Further research into supertaskers may reveal how the multitasking regions of their brains are different, due to some inherited variation. Watson predicts that employers in high-performance professions will want to screen for genetic markers of supertasking ability. Generation Whatever’s multi-mediated brains may be the key to our ever-faster future.
But even in a hyper-accelerated culture, someone is going to have to pay close attention to socially indispensable matters such as law, politics, academia and medicine – disciplines that demand conscientiousness and a gimlet eye for mono-tasking detail. Old-brainers, the over-thirties, aren’t out of business yet. So we should not be so snippy about welcoming the children of the network-minded generation, even if we don’t understand their ways.
John Naish is the author of “Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More” (Hodder, £7.99)
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