Empathy among Americans did decline sharply over several decades, with college students in 2009 scoring 40% lower on standard empathy measures than students in the late 1970s. But the story is more complicated than a simple downward slide. Recent data shows empathy has been rising again among young people since 2008, nearly returning to 1970s levels. So the real question isn’t just “why is empathy declining” but “what forces push empathy down, and what brings it back?”
What the Data Actually Shows
The most cited research on empathy decline comes from a 2011 meta-analysis by social psychologist Sara Konrath at Indiana University, which examined 72 samples of American college students totaling nearly 14,000 people between 1979 and 2009. Two core dimensions of empathy dropped significantly over that period. Emotional empathy, the ability to feel concern for others, fell the most. Cognitive empathy, the ability to see situations from another person’s point of view, also declined, though less steeply.
What many people don’t know is that Konrath updated that study in 2024. The new data, covering 2008 through 2018, found that both types of empathy have been increasing among late Millennials and Gen Z young adults. This contradicts the popular narrative that each generation is less empathic than the last. The decline was real, but it wasn’t permanent, and it wasn’t a one-way trajectory.
How Digital Communication Changes Connection
One of the strongest explanations for the original decline centers on how people communicate. Empathy relies heavily on nonverbal cues: facial expressions, tone of voice, body posture, eye contact. When communication shifts to text messages, emails, and social media posts, most of those signals disappear. Research in communication theory consistently shows that people perceive their conversation partners as less empathic and less friendly when interacting through text alone. This isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a predictable consequence of stripping social cues from conversation.
The brain systems involved in empathy depend on real-time, in-person signals to function properly. When you watch someone’s face while they talk, specialized neural circuits help you mirror their emotional state, essentially letting you feel a version of what they feel. Screen-based communication disrupts this process. Video calls come closer to replicating face-to-face interaction, but even small delays and the inability to make true eye contact through a screen degrade the quality of emotional information your brain receives. The result is that virtual interactions require more mental effort to process the same social content and still produce a less complete emotional picture.
People instinctively try to compensate. The rise of emojis, memes, and reaction GIFs is essentially an attempt to reintroduce emotional cues into communication channels that lack them. But these substitutes remain crude compared to the richness of a live human face. Studies during the pandemic found that when people used both digital and face-to-face communication, they felt less connected overall than when they relied on face-to-face interaction alone. Adding digital communication didn’t supplement real connection. It diluted it.
Political Polarization and the Collapse of Compassion
Empathy doesn’t just erode passively. In politically polarized environments, people actively suppress it. Research from Iowa State University describes a phenomenon where partisans who learn that someone from the opposing political party is suffering from a harmful policy actually feel less sympathy for that person, not more. In some cases, learning about out-group suffering increased support for the very policy causing the harm.
This happens through a process called emotional down-regulation. When feeling compassion for someone on the “other side” conflicts with your political identity, the emotional cost feels too high. Your brain resolves the conflict by dialing down the empathic response. The research found something particularly counterintuitive: people with higher natural empathic ability were more likely to suppress their compassion toward political opponents, not less. Their greater emotional sensitivity made the conflict between empathy and partisan loyalty feel more intense, so they shut it down more forcefully.
This isn’t about people being incapable of empathy. It’s about empathy being selectively deployed. Americans increasingly assign negative traits to members of the opposing party and positive traits to their own. When someone is sorted into the “other” category, the normal empathic response gets overridden. The researchers concluded that encouraging empathetic connections across party lines is unlikely to reduce hostility on its own, because the suppression mechanism is deeply tied to identity.
Empathy as a Choice, Not a Fixed Trait
A growing body of neuroscience research frames empathy not as a capacity you have or lack, but as a motivated process you engage in or avoid. Brain regions involved in sharing another person’s emotional experience show reduced activity when someone views a suffering out-group member compared to a suffering in-group member. This isn’t a hardware limitation. It’s a software choice, made below conscious awareness.
People use several strategies to control how much empathy they experience. They avoid situations expected to evoke it. They mentally distance themselves from suffering they don’t want to engage with. They reframe situations to minimize emotional impact. These aren’t signs of broken empathy circuits. They’re signs of a system that regulates itself based on context, identity, and perceived emotional cost. When empathizing feels safe, rewarding, or aligned with your identity, you do it. When it feels threatening, exhausting, or politically inconvenient, you pull back.
This “motivated empathy” framework helps explain both the decline and the recent rebound. If empathy responds to social incentives and cultural conditions, then changes in those conditions can move empathy in either direction. The factors that drove empathy down between 1979 and 2009 may have shifted enough in the following decade to allow recovery.
Culture Shapes Empathy Differently Across Countries
Most of the data on empathy decline comes from American college students, which raises the question of whether this is a global phenomenon or a culturally specific one. Cross-cultural research suggests empathy levels and their determinants vary significantly based on whether a society is more individualistic or collectivistic. A comparative study of medical students in Brazil and Switzerland found that Brazilian students scored consistently higher in empathy than their Swiss counterparts, and that Brazilian students’ perspective-taking actually increased over four years of training while Swiss students showed no change.
The personality trait most consistently linked to higher empathy across cultures was openness to experience. But other factors, like gender differences in empathy and the relationship between empathy and career motivations, varied by location. This means that sweeping claims about a global empathy crisis likely overstate the case. The forces driving empathy trends differ from one cultural context to another, and interventions that work in one setting may not transfer to another.
What Empathy Loss Does to Workplaces and Health
When empathy declines in professional settings, the consequences are measurable. In healthcare, lower empathy among providers correlates with worse clinical outcomes and lower patient satisfaction. Research among mental healthcare workers in France found that staff in high-stress settings like forensic psychiatric units showed the highest levels of depersonalization (treating patients as objects rather than people) and the lowest levels of compassionate care. Burnout and empathy loss feed each other in a cycle: burned-out workers become less empathic, which damages team morale, which increases turnover, which increases workload on remaining staff, which accelerates burnout further.
This contagion effect extends beyond healthcare. In any workplace where psychological demands outpace people’s capacity to cope, empathy becomes one of the first things sacrificed. It takes energy to care about other people’s experiences, and when that energy is depleted by overwork, financial stress, or information overload, the brain conserves resources by narrowing its circle of concern. The declining empathy measured in studies isn’t necessarily a moral failure. It may be a widespread adaptive response to environments that demand too much emotional labor with too little recovery time.