There is a key fault common to every 'scientific' study done in this area - and there is an immense number of these studies done every year.
The correct headline should be as follows: "Engineering students do not view themselves as caring as medical students do." Key point being that these are not studies done on 'action', but rather on 'cheap speech'. I can claim to be the most empathetic person alive, but will happily walk out the room and flip off a beggar asking for change while still believing I am empathetic as I may subconsciously not recognize the act.
This is a huge problem with these kind of studies, and imho, these studies are fairly worthless. If you want to test this kind of thing, pretend to be a beggar outside each faculty and see which students actually help the most rather than say they will help the most.
I'm intrigued by the credence given to studies based on self-reported emotional states.
For example, I've seen a ton of studies on happiness.. for example studies that report on the happiest countries. How do they control for cultural imperatives? I think we all know people who consider depression etc to be character flaws. I'd go as far as to say most people feel pressure to represent themselves as happy and content. Being honest about yourself is seriously difficult, even when you're the only one listening.
The headline was something like "Engineers have no empathy and are cold and dead inside" and linked to a sensational article on theregister. Now the title is more moderate and it links to the scientific paper instead. What happened?
The correct headline should be as follows: "Engineering students do not view themselves as caring as medical students do." Key point being that these are not studies done on 'action', but rather on 'cheap speech'. I can claim to be the most empathetic person alive, but will happily walk out the room and flip off a beggar asking for change while still believing I am empathetic as I may subconsciously not recognize the act.
This is a huge problem with these kind of studies, and imho, these studies are fairly worthless. If you want to test this kind of thing, pretend to be a beggar outside each faculty and see which students actually help the most rather than say they will help the most.