Dwindling empathy in hyperconnected age: Why adolescents matter

An earlier column touched on social conditions that weaken empathy. This column builds on that discussion by focusing on adolescents whose social habits are becoming the norm for society. The concern is not declining empathy itself, but the erosion of the conditions undergirding it.

Among adolescents in Korea, troubling signs surface daily in the news: coercing peers into sexual exploitation, luring others into predatory financial schemes or perpetuating harassment in physical and digital realms. Some youth take advantage of being below the legal age of criminal responsibility and show little remorse for the consequences of their actions. While public response typically centers on blaming individuals, it may be far more instructive to ask what social arrangements and conditions engender such a diminished capacity for empathy.

Digital life offers a useful starting point. Adolescents in Korea are among the most connected in the world, navigating between platforms that reward speed, brevity and reactions. These environments compress communication into fragments of text, emojis and the three-dot typing indicator, while stripping away the nonverbal cues that facilitate emotional understanding. More consequentially, they reorganize social experience by replacing exposure to others’ inner lives with curated images, metrics of approval and rapid cycles of response. In such conditions, others are perceived less as multidimensional individuals and more as objects of evaluation.

Anonymity afforded by digital platforms exacerbates this issue, as young individuals may act with a degree of detachment not often seen in face-to-face encounters. Cyberbullying and cancel culture illustrate how empathy can be abandoned when the emotional consequences of one’s words are not immediately perceptible. What emerges is not necessarily an intent to harm, but a form of psychological distancing with fractured emotional connections. This leads to a decline in both accountability and the capacity to consider another’s perspective.

These dynamics are not isolated. Korean family and community structures have rapidly transformed alongside urbanization and demographic change. Extended family networks and tight-knit communities once provided opportunities to observe and practice emotional attunement and care across generations. Today, the rise of single-child households and individualism has contributed to social disconnection and sometimes more self-centered orientations among children.

Parental authority has also shifted; family life is increasingly child-centered, with parents attempting to meet their children’s needs and becoming more permissive toward aggressive or inappropriate behavior. With fewer siblings, children grow up lacking opportunities for everyday social negotiation and perspective-taking, thereby reducing their capacity to develop and practice empathy.

Korea’s performance-centered education system reinforces these conditions. From an early age, children are placed on a competitive academic track focused on entering prestigious universities. Peers are primarily viewed as competitors, attention is directed toward performance and empathy — which requires time, attentiveness and openness to others’ perspectives — becomes more difficult to cultivate. Paradoxically, research indicates that individuals with stronger empathic capacities tend to achieve more positive long-term social and professional outcomes, as empathy underpins cooperation, trust and conflict management.

The shift in academic focus is also significant. Psychologists, including Raymond Mar and Jamil Zaki, have emphasized the role of indirect experience — particularly through reading fiction — in cultivating empathy. Narratives invite readers into the inner worlds of others, prompting reflection on their own emotional experiences. This process strengthens the capacity for perspective-taking and emotional insight.

Adolescence is a period when individuals are especially responsive to this imaginative engagement. Yet, sustained reading and reflective experiences are crowded out by intense academic pressure, long hours in private academies and digitally mediated distraction. As a result, one of the most accessible pathways to empathy is steadily eroding.

If empathy is shaped by the environments in which adolescents grow, its decline reflects the cumulative effects of social conditions shaped by speed, competition and interactions on screen. The challenge is not simply to advocate for more empathy, but to rebuild the conditions that allow it to take root. This begins with small but deliberate actions. Families need to make time for device-free conversation in which emotional cues are visible, thereby fostering greater emotional awareness. By expanding opportunities for collaborative learning and social-emotional education, schools can demonstrate that interpersonal understanding is foundational to a caring society. Through community opportunities for volunteering, mentorship or shared activities, adolescents can encounter difference in meaningful ways.

Finally, as a society, we need to create opportunities for adolescents to reclaim time for reflection and imagination. Public libraries in Korea already offer avenues for engagement, such as therapeutic book clubs, writing workshops and author talks. Access to and participation in these programs are likely to cultivate empathy as a practiced way of relating to one another.

The decline of empathy among adolescents is neither inevitable nor irreversible. It is a signal that reflects the environments we have constructed and the values we have chosen to reward. If we hope to foster a generation capable of genuine understanding and care, we must attend to the environments that nurture such understanding and work to recreate the conditions under which empathy is learned, practiced and sustained.

Ma Kyung-hee is a Seoul-based editor and researcher focusing on psychological well-being and community care.