The Young Pioneers Of The Empathic Generation

The Huffington Post -For my niece Robin, who graduated from Vanderbilt University in May, an important part of her college experience was the volunteer work she did working with Sudanese refugees. Every week she spent hours helping them resettle in the Nashville area. She also worked to make Americans more aware of the suffering in Sudan's civil war, especially in the Darfur region, and helped raise money for resettlement costs. In her junior year, Robin spent a semester in Cape Town, South Africa, where she wrote an honors thesis on expressions of public opinion in South Africa's democratic system. Now she is contemplating going to graduate school in some kind of international field.

Robin's experience is not unusual today. She is part of what pollster John Zogby calls the "First Globals," a generation of 18-29 year-olds whose "planet is their playing field." Today's emerging adults see themselves as international citizens to an extent rarely experienced before. Coming of age in the era of the Internet, cheap travel, and surging study abroad programs, they're drawn to global music, sports, fashion, and service. Almost a quarter of the emerging adults Zogby polled expect to work abroad.

They could also be called the Empathic Generation. Their international experiences and education have made them more aware than any previous generation of how interconnected the world is. According to Zogby, they expect to be able to vacation, live and shop anywhere they like, and they prefer to do so with a clear conscience: they want people in developing countries protected from the depredations of multinational corporations and the destructive fiscal policies of multinational lending institutions.

Other research shows that the empathy of today's emerging adults extends across boundaries of gender, sexual orientation, ethnic group, and religion. Read more.