Does political correctness teach lack of empathy?

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

By Helen Smith

Stuart Schneiderman has additional thoughts on why college student’s lack empathy:

Here political correctness makes a contribution, especially by teaching young people to be intolerant of differing political and cultural viewpoints. If you tell people that they should only listen to people whose ideas echo their own, you are in the business of producing narcissists. ….

Clearly, something paradoxical is afoot in the land. Dr. Helen Smith identifies the problem clearly. In her view, students are gaining their good feelings on the cheap. They support government programs that are supposed to care for people because they want to feel good about having the right feelings. They have not advanced to the level of wondering about whether these programs are helping real people.

The students are so involved with their own good feelings that they have no sense of the realities of the programs they support. If you really care about other people you care about whether they have jobs. If you support quasi-socialistic experiments that end up costing jobs and then vote for politicians who want to set up more and more programs to take care of the unemployed… does that show how much you care for other people or how little you are interested in their lives?

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Kris W

I am still going to go with the current gender imbalance as a reason why the level of empathy is falling.

The few guy's on campus can develop a "girl's are a dime a dozen mentality", while gal's can develop a mentality of "doing whatever it takes to get what you want".

Both could destroy a normal person's ability to be empathic.

But this is just pure conjecture as the study is incomplete. Without a gender comparison(they only looked at race and age if I remember correctly) there can be multiple of reason's why, with each being as plausible as the next.

With more definitive data you can draw a more definitive answer.

Without gender,economic class and perhaps race as data points this study is totally worthless.

Does political correctness teach lack of empathy?

Sex & Metropolis

Dads on the Air