Assignment:
Changing Values?
Contemporary cheating behaviors offer a stark and unflattering contrast to the views of a 1928 Princeton University freshman writing home: Father, you suggest that the greatest benefit from college is to be found in . . . habits of intellectual diligence and application. I am nonetheless putting my chief emphasis on the study of right and wrong.
UCLA's annual survey of college first-year students provides further evidence of changing values among young people. Responding to the 2012 survey, a record 81 percent of first-year students valued wealth as a goal, but only 46 percent sought a "meaningful philosophy of life." That result is essentially a reversal of the 1971 survey when 37 percent of freshmen identified being "very well off financially" as an essential or very important objective, and 73 percent felt the same about "developing a meaningful philosophy of life." The college experience, however, seems to strengthen some important ethical values. A 2010 UCLA study found that students were more likely as juniors than as freshmen to say that "they wanted to develop a meaningful philosophy of life, seek beauty, become a more loving person, and attain inner harmony." Broadly, as compared with their freshmen attitudes, college juniors are more likely to be engaged in a spiritual quest and more likely to be "caring" persons.
On the other hand, The Atlantic in 2013 reported on a growing body of evidence claiming we are in the midst of a "narcissism epidemic." One study based on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory of college students nationwide, responding to such statements as "I think I am a special person," concluded that the average college student today is about 30 percent more selfabsorbed than the average student in 1982. One of the study leaders, Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, remarked: "We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘you're special,' . . . Kids are self-centered enough already." [The UCLA freshmen survey website: https://www.heri.ucla.edu/cirpoverview.php] [Professor Twenge's website: https://www.jeantwenge.com/]
Questions
1. Do you think you and your college friends are excessively narcissistic and insufficiently empathetic? Explain.
2. Why might empathy be declining among college students? [To measure your own level of empathy and to compare it with the average empathy level of college students, see https://umichisr.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_bCvraMmZBCcov52&SVID].