In the paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 13 people were shown documentary-style multimedia narratives designed to arouse empathy. Researchers recorded their brain activity and found that empathy is as deeply rooted in the human psyche as fear and anger.
They also noticed that empathic brain systems took an average of six to eight seconds to start up. The researchers didn't connect this to media consumption habits, but the study's press release fueled speculation that the Facebook generation could turn into sociopaths.
Entitled Can Twitter Make You Amoral? Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass, it claimed that the research “raises questions about the emotional cost particularly for the developing brain of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter."
The study itself neither posed nor answered the question, but the extrapolation was widely repeated. And while the underlying case for the extrapolation is entirely plausible, the focus on Twitter and Facebook may be a red herring.
Compared to in-depth news coverage, first-person Tweets of on-the-ground events, such as the 2008 Mumbai bombings, is generally unmoving. But in those situations, Twitter's primary use is in gathering useful, immediate facts, not storytelling.
Most people who read a handful of words about a friend's heartache, or see a link to a tragic story, would likely follow it up. But following links to a video news story makes the possibility of a short-circuited neurobiology of compassion becomes more real.
Research suggests that people are far more empathic when stories are told in a linear way, without quick shot-to-shot edits. In a 1996 Empirical Studies of the Arts paper, researchers showed three versions of an ostensibly tear-jerking story to 120 test subjects. “Subjects had significantly more favorable impressions of the victimized female protagonist than of her male opponent only when the story structure was linear," they concluded.
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