s more empathic than another. And I’m skeptical about the idea that teenagers are somehow less sensitive to the pain of others.
So that’s what bothered me when I first saw the popular headlines. But when I actually read the study, I discovered these surprising facts (Blakemore et al 2007).
1. The study didn’t really have anything to do with empathy. It was about asking people to anticipate their intentions. Just to be sure, I checked with the principal investigator. She confirms that the hypothetical scenarios presented in the study were “devoid of emotional content.”
2. There was no difference in the way that teens and adults answered the questions. In terms of behavior, both groups performed the same way.
3. Contrary to the popular story that teens “underuse” the medial frontal cortex, the study actually established the opposite pattern .
Teenagers showed more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, not less.
That’s right. The teens used the medial prefrontal cortex--the part of the brain associated with empathy and social decision making-- more than adults did.
Why? That’s not clear. Possibly, it reflects efficiency. In general, adult brains have more streamlined neural networks, making them faster and more efficient processors of information. Teen brains might have to work harder to get the same answers. They may need more oxygen or energy to power their neural circuits (Burnett and Blakemore 2009).
Life experiences might play a role, too. I’ve had a lot of experience making decisions about where to sit at the cinema. Ask me a hypothetical question about it, and I don’t have to deliberate to give you an answer about what I would do. For teens, answering such questions might require more conscious thought (Burnett and Blakemore 2009).
Or maybe teenagers—who are notoriously self-conscious and concerned about how others respond to them—are more likely to view changing seats in a theater as a social problem.
But whatever the explanation, the fact remains: The widely-reported story about teen brains “lacking empathy” is entirely bogus. The study found an interesting difference in the ways that teens processed information, but the difference did not demonstrate that teens are less empathic than adults.
Yet major news organizations--including WebMD, MSNBC and CBS--printed the distortions on their websites. And it wouldn’t have happened if reporters had waited to read the study—or simply asked some pertinent questions.
The “teen brains lack empathy” story is a rather extreme case. But there are plenty of other examples of research that gets the wrong spin.
Recently, I saw headlines proclaiming that “TV causes learning lag in infants.” In reality, the research in question suggested that babies develop better language skills when they get lots of conversation time with adults. To the degree that TV time displaces conversation time, it hurts baby language development. There may be lots of reasons to restrict TV time for young children. But these studies didn’t find that TV is intrinsically damaging to language development.
misleading headlines about TV diverted the public’s attention from the
real story--that parents who care about language development should make
time to really engage their babies in frequent, meaningful
conversations. For more information,
see this analysis of the research on baby language development, conversation time, and TV.
Of course, the problem isn’t limited to research about kids.
Misleading press releases about medical research
In 2009, Steven Woloshin and colleagues examined press releases from 20 different academic medical centers.
The findings are disturbing. Of the 200 press releases randomly selected for analysis
• 19 presented unpublished results, but only one of these stories cautioned the reader that the research was unpublished
• 53 reported on correlational studies (e.g., “x is linked with y”), but only 6 of the releases included a caution about possible confounding variables
• 6 press releases reported on uncontrolled studies, but only one included a caution about the lack of controls
• 