A Lack of Empathy – By Stefano Moino

Courtesy of http://sds.parsons.edu/transdesign/the-problem-with-a-single-story/

“Empathy in college students, over a 30-year period, has reduced by 48%,” according to an analysis by Sarah Konrath, a researcher and philanthropist at the University of Indiana. The ability to understand and share feelings with others, (empathy), is on a decline due to the explosion of, “overly simplistic and sometimes false perceptions we form about individuals, groups, or countries,” (single stories).

The single story has been told to all of us. At young ages we are more perceptible and vulnerable to the single story, yet even as we grow older we can be just as vulnerable to its effects. One cause of the single story is social media; according to Christopher Seneca, a writer at “WIRED,” an online news blog, Social media “creates echo chambers in which a user is never presented with alternative perspectives,” this means that one can fed the information that is specified to them so they don’t always see other people’s perspectives. Once fed information that one believe’s to be true, one may tend to defend this idea even if this idea may not entirely be true.

Social media not only shows us information that we generally associate with, but it also labels people by their skin colour, religion, place of origin, Etc. For example, news stories, “mentioning Muslims are far more likely to be negative than those in any other category. Of all stories mentioning Muslims or Islam, 78 percent are negative, compared with only 40 percent of those about Catholics, 46 percent about Jews and 49 percent about Hindus. Muslims are clearly distinctive as the only group associated with overwhelmingly negative coverage,” states Erik Bleich, a journalist at the Washington Post.

The Single story can be very powerful especially in the hands of people of power, as a story itself can be a very powerful tool. According to Chimamanda Adichie a writer in Nigeria, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” Adiche is saying that stories can be very powerful, you must fact check and see both sides of the story before reacting or you are giving more power to a single story that in its entirety may not be true.

Single stories plague our societies and cultures, but there are also many solutions to this issue. According to Michael Wesch, an anthropologist and university professor, one solution is to face what you do not know and learn about it, one step at a time, “to put us in touch with the sacred story of life the trials and tribulations of which are sometimes hard to face, yet when we do so that’s when we are gifted the gift of life.” Someone admitting that they are blinded by a single story can be the toughest part of seeing the bigger picture and becoming more empathetic, but the first step is the most important part.

A challenge that Wesch posed was to talk with some one that you would not normally associate with. My New Media teacher, Ms. Shong, then gave my class this same challenge of talking to someone who you don’t normally talk to, and I was assigned Noah Dal Santo. He and I had previously gone to middle school with each other and had had some classes before, so I had general idea of who he was and he had a general idea of who I was. For our assignment we had to post a picture of us along with some questions that we had answered with this challenge we had been assigned some questions like what we were interested in or comparing our differences, in answering these questions we learned more about each other than the single stories we had of each other.

Empathy, in recent years, has been declining in people around the world due to single stories and their over simplified description of people, places, and things. A single story may or may not be entirely true, but that single story does not make up who or what that person or place is or has become. One may assume that they would not fall into the traps of a single story, but it can be easy to be blind if you are immersed.