Maia Szalavitz, in Psychology Today:

College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new meta-analysis presented to at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by University of Michigan researchers. It includes data from over 14,000 students.

Although we argue in Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered that modern child-rearing practices are putting empathy at risk, this is the largest study presented so far to quantify the decline.

Previous research done by psychologist Jean Twenge had measured what she labeled a "narcissism epidemic," with more students showing selfish qualities and with increases in traits that can lead to a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. That is a condition in which people are so self-involved that other people are no more than objects to reflect their glory.

But I was less than convinced by that data because some of the measures of narcissism--statements like "I am a special person," --might reflect a lifetime spent in classrooms aimed at raising self-esteem rather than a true increase in self-centeredness.

The survey on empathy used in this study--which you can take for yourself here--however, is another matter. While it so obviously measures empathy that you could easily game it to make yourself look kinder and nicer, the fact that today's college students don't even feel compelled to do that suggests that the study is measuring something real. If young people don't even care about seeming uncaring, something is seriously wrong. Another survey in the research found that people also think that others around them are less compassionate...

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:  Ross Douthat takes note and asks questions:

The fact that the tipping point seems to coincide with the rise of the internet should send everyone rushing off to read Christine Rosen's 2007 essay on social networking, "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism," which could have been written with just these findings in mind. But it's also interesting to consider this trend in light of the oft-heard claim that the millennial generation is more idealistic, more civic-minded, and more engaged with the world than its cynical Gen X predecessors.

On the face of it, these seem like contradictory portraits — how can the same generation be more solipsistic and more interested in human betterment and ambitious social activism? But maybe they actually go hand in hand. There's a kind of humanitarianism that's more interested in an abstract "humanity" than in actual people, and a kind of idealism that's hard to distinguish from moral vanity. Perhaps this is the spirit that's at work among the empathy-deficient world-changers of Generation Y — visible, for instance, in the way that community service has become a self-interested resume-padding exercise for ambitious young climbers, or in the way that Barack Obama's rhetoric ("we are the ones we've been waiting for," etc.) managed to appeal to younger voters' idealism and flatter their egos all at once...

Read the rest.