“As with the decline, we might grasp for explanations for this rise. One possibility is collective suffering. Since the empathic lows of 2009, we have faced the Great Recession and a once-a-century pandemic. For all their horrors, hard times can bring people together. In her beautiful book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit chronicles disasters including San Francisco’s 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11. In the wake of these catastrophes, kindness ticked up, strangers stepping over lines of race and class to help one another. More recently, researchers chronicled a ‘pandemic of kindness,’ as donations to charity and volunteering increased in the face of COVID-19. Still, history is not a science experiment, and it’s impossible to know exactly why American empathy has risen, just like we can’t isolate with certainty why it fell. But we might ask another question: Will people react to this good news as strongly as they did to the bad news that preceded it?” Vox: Compassion is making a comeback in America. ” In 2011, a landmark study led by researcher Sara Konrath examined the trends in those surveys. The analysis revealed that American empathy had plummeted: The average US college student in 2009 reported feeling less empathic than 75 percent of students three decades earlier … A few months ago, she and her colleagues published an update to their work: They found that empathy among young Americans is rebounding, reaching levels indistinguishable from the highs of the 1970s.” (I’m not sure I feel more compassion than I did in the 70s, but I can empathize with people that do.)