In a world that feels increasingly broken, where should we place the most attention to vital global social issues: Should we prioritize addressing the risks to healthcare? Or the silent genocide of the Rohingya people? How much should we address immigrant and refugee rights while also eradicating the odious cultures of racism, sexism, and xenophobia that still, terrifyingly, linger? When it comes to assuaging these social ills, we have to go back to the root cause of these social problems: a lack of empathy.

As an individual who has dedicated my academic work to understanding the roots of human moral development, witnessing contemporary Americas pervasive aloofness towards cultivating empathy is simply deplorable to witness. While I dont wish to romanticize a past which always had its share of injustices, it seems that the human capacity for empathy has declined; society, writ large, is simply less empathetic. A study from the University of Michigan found that todays college students score 40 percent lower than their counterparts from the 1970s in the ability to understand what others are feeling. The biggest drop came at the turn of the millennium and some scholars suggest that the decline of empathy is primarily because people spend less time interacting face-to-face and more time staring at screens.