We were all waiting with baited breath, and then it finally came. The annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. There’s really nothing quite like it: Harold McGee’s thoughts during “Spicing Up Psychological Science,” or Steven B. Most discussing “Uncovering Mechanisms of Emotion-Cognition Interactions.”

Must See baby!

But seriously, there was one item discussed at the meeting, held in Boston May 27-30, that was of interest to me. It was a University of Michigan study that shows today’s college students are not as empathetic as college students of the 1980s and ’90s. The study analyzed data on empathy among almost 14,000 college students over the last 30 years.

It wasn’t as much that a lack of empathy caught my eye — I mean, who the hell cares (get it?)? More so, it was the factors behind the apparent reduction in empathy found in the study. They included increased selfishness amongst “Generation Me,” increased exposure to violent media content which creates a numbing effect, and the use of social media tools.

“The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline,” Science Daily quoted U-M graduate student Edward O’Brien, who along with U-M researcher Sara Konrath and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing conducted the meta-analysis, combining the results of 72 different studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009.

The study found college students today are less likely to agree with statements such as, “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective,” and, “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”

“College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait,” Konrath also told Science Daily.

So with the study in mind, I considered some typical social media usage trends — and not just college students but the broader spectrum of upright mammals.

Assuming that conversation as a medium creates a more likely platform for empathetic reaction, increased use of social media tools has unquestionably led to less conversation. And many of us tend to now use tools like instant message instead of face-to-face discussion, email rather than call, 140 characters on Twitter — all the while, our communication styles go from long-form to shorter and shorter.

Maybe you buy it, maybe you don’t. Maybe you aren’t empathizing with my point and don’t care (there I go again). But if you’re an active social media user, it should at least should give use pause the next time someone calls your cell phone and you consider forgoing picking it up in favor of sending a response via text.

Oh, the hell with it. I don’t really care.

Click here to test your level of empathy and compare how you scored to the average empathy level of college students.