It seems evident that we tend to empathize more with those people we know well: our friends, family members and, in general, the people we have seen from time to time for many years.
From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that this is so because caring for the closest members of our community is a way to increase the chances that many of our genes, which are also found in people with a lineage close to ours, will be passed on to future generations.
This scheme of the social functioning of all human beings may seem robust, but it is far from explaining everything. What happens, for example, when there are members of our community who are not even our species? Can it be normal that we are able to feel more empathy for a non-human animal than for a person? This possibility does not seem far-fetched, judging by what was explained earlier in this article, but there are also specific studies that address our way of empathizing with humans and pets and the preferences we show between them.
A few years ago, sociologists of the Northeastern University Arnold Arluke and Jack Levin decided to find out To what extent is it true that we tend to empathize more with pets or people? To do this, they showed 240 men and women a text that looked like a newspaper article in which criminal acts were described. These stories included a part in which one could read how an assailant had beaten someone using a bat. baseball. In a version of the article that was only read by a few people, this assailant attacked a puppy dog ​​until he broke some bones and left him unconscious, while in alternative versions of this same article the one who received the blows was an adult dog, a baby or an adult human being of about 30 years old.
After reading one of these versions of the article, and without knowing that they were fictional stories, each of the people who participated in the study They rated on a scale the degree to which they empathized with the victim and they were saddened by what had happened to him. The results do not leave the adult human being in a very happy position, whose story was the one that left most of the volunteers most indifferent. The article that caused the most consternation was the story about the human baby, closely followed by the story about the puppy, while the story about the adult dog came in third place.
Arluke and Levin point out that when it comes to awakening a feeling of empathy, both species and age matter. However, the variable that seems to explain most of our emotional response in these cases is not the species of being that is in danger, but the degree to which we perceive that he is a helpless and defenseless being This can explain why an adult dog arouses more compassion in us than a 30-year-old human being. The first seems to us less capable of protecting his own life because he lives in a world controlled by our species.
Time to choose: would you save a human or an animal?
In another experiment led by members of the Georgia Regents University and the Cape Fear Community College, several researchers focused on seeing how we empathize with animals when faced with a moral dilemma. Specifically, they set out to see to what extent we behave better with animals or with humans using a group of 573 people of practically all ages as a sample. These participants were put in a hypothetical situation in which an out-of-control bus put the lives of two beings (a human and a dog) at risk and They had to choose which of the two to save
The results of this study, published in the journal Anthrozoans, show once again how empathy with pets or humans cannot be predicted only by taking into account the species to which the potential victim belongs. When giving an answer, participants took into account who was the human at risk and who was the dog. 40% of people preferred to help the dog when it was described as their pet and the human was an anonymous tourist, and something similar happened when the person was someone unknown from the same city (37% opted to save the dog). But only 14% preferred to save the dog when both he and the person were anonymous.
Interestingly, in addition, the women who participated in the experiment showed a greater propensity to offer protection to the quadruped. More or less, the chance of choosing to save the dog was doubled when the responder was a woman.
First class animals… and second class
Of course, this last experiment moves in the realm of the imaginary, and may not correspond exactly to what would happen in a real situation. Thinking about it, something tells me that if a scenario really occurred in which a bus plows into a person and a dog, the instinctive reaction of most observers would not be to decide which of the two to save with a well-timed push. However, it is still curious to see how some animals have managed to enter the area of ​​our moral operations and are capable of being treated as beings towards whom guide our decisions and our ethics
Despite this, we know that being an animal of one species or another greatly influences the way we are considered. You just need to see how some cats have managed to take over YouTube, while other species (mosquitoes, spiders, mice, birds of prey…) seem to awaken a tremendous desire to kill in a large part of the population.
The species matters, yes, but it is not everything. We may only spontaneously empathize with some species evolutionarily prepared to live with us and the rest are treated as little more than raw material for the meat industry, but for now we know that we are not programmed to protect only those of our lineage. Our most distant relatives are perfectly capable of being considered as important as anyone else, if not more so.
