The kids are alright

Hey!  It’s time to present an example of bad reporting of a scientific paper in a popular (ish?) publication!

Today’s victim is a paper by Sara H. Konrath, Edward H. O'Brien and Courtney Hsing that was published in Personality and Social Psychology back in 2010.

This meta-analysis of 72 previous studies found that self-reported empathy of college-aged students had dropped in the neighborhood of 10% over the past 30 years.

Here’s how the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that:

[I]n a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision") have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.

Hmm...  Those numbers don't seem to be the same.  What's going on here?

Mark Liberman at Language log tries to explain how good papers go bad -- ly reported, that is...

Or, maybe college kids are just crazy, these days...  That's what it said in the New York Times -- must be true, then, right?

Suddenly, I crave a cheese sandwich...

Via, Vaughan Bell.