Picture yourself reading a news story about a brutal attack. Someone beat a victim with a baseball bat, leaving them unconscious with broken bones and multiple wounds. Police found no suspects.
Now answer this question: How upset would you feel?
Your emotional response might surprise you. Scientists discovered something unsettling about human empathy when they tested this exact scenario. Two sociologists at Northeastern University wanted to understand why news reports about animal cruelty often trigger more public outrage than stories about violence against people. What they found challenges everything we think we know about compassion.
Jack Levin and Arnold Arluke created a fake Boston Globe article describing a vicious baseball bat attack. But they wrote four different versions of the same story. Each version described identical circumstances with one critical difference: the victim’s identity. Some participants read about a one-year-old child. Others read about an adult in his thirties. Some learned about a puppy. Others read about a six-year-old dog.
None of these attacks actually happened. Researchers fabricated every detail to test a widespread belief that people care more about animals than humans. What they discovered was far more complicated.
How Sociologists Tested Our Sympathy Using Fake News
Levin, an authority on serial killers and mass murderers, partnered with Arluke, a prolific researcher in anthrozoology (the study of human-animal interactions). Together, they recruited 240 university students for their experiment. Participants received one of the four fictional news articles at random. After reading their assigned story, each person rated their feelings of empathy toward the victim.
Researchers measured emotional responses using a scale with 15 different dimensions of personal distress. Participants indicated how much sympathy, concern, and emotional pain they felt after reading about each attack. Every detail in the four versions remained identical except for who suffered the beating.
Students had no idea they were reading fabricated content. They believed the Boston Globe published these reports and that real attacks had occurred. Researchers needed this authenticity to capture genuine emotional reactions rather than socially acceptable responses.
Which Victims Made People Feel Most Distressed
Results revealed an X-shaped pattern in the data. Statisticians call this an “interaction effect” between species (human versus dog) and age (young versus old). One-year-old children elicited the highest empathy scores. Puppies came in second, scoring almost identically to the human babies. Six-year-old dogs ranked third. Adult humans in their thirties scored lowest.
Here’s what shocked researchers most: the difference between empathy for children and puppies was statistically insignificant. People felt nearly the same level of distress whether they read about a beaten toddler or a beaten puppy. Meanwhile, adult human victims received less sympathy than any other group.
Women showed higher emotional response scores than men across all victim types. Hundreds of previous studies have confirmed this pattern. Female participants consistently demonstrate more empathy and express greater concern about animal suffering. Yet the ranking of victims remained consistent regardless of gender. Both men and women placed adult humans at the bottom of their sympathy hierarchy.
Age Beats Species When Your Brain Decides Who Deserves Sympathy
Levin explained the findings: “Contrary to popular thinking, we are not necessarily more disturbed by animal rather than human suffering. Our results indicate a much more complex situation with respect to the age and species of victims, with age being the more important component.”
Age emerged as the dominant factor driving empathy responses. Vulnerability and perceived helplessness mattered far more than whether a victim walked on two legs or four. Young creatures triggered protective instincts regardless of species. Adult humans failed to activate those same emotional circuits.
Participants apparently judged each victim’s capacity for self-protection. One-year-old children cannot defend themselves against attackers. Neither can puppies. Adult humans, however, possess the strength, intelligence, and resources to protect themselves or escape danger. People assume grown humans can fight back. Dogs of any age remain dependent and defenseless.
Innocence perception also links children and young animals. Neither babies nor puppies can be blamed for their circumstances. They exist as pure victims without complicating factors like personal choices or past behaviors.
Why Full-Grown Dogs Get Treated Like Perpetual Puppies
Something unusual happened with the dog victims. Unlike humans, age made almost no difference in empathy scores for canines. Six-year-old dogs received nearly the same sympathy as puppies. Adult dogs maintained their helpless status throughout life.
Levin noted: “Age seems to trump species, when it comes to eliciting empathy. In addition, it appears that adult humans are viewed as capable of protecting themselves while full grown dogs are just seen as larger puppies.”
Size and maturity change nothing about how people perceive dogs. A full-grown German Shepherd still triggers the same protective response as a tiny puppy. People view adult dogs as dependent beings who need human care and protection. Dogs never graduate into self-sufficient creatures in our minds.
Adult humans, by contrast, lose their victim status as they age. Society expects grown people to handle threats and solve problems independently. Someone who gets attacked at 30 doesn’t inspire the same protective instinct as a toddler facing identical danger.
When People Would Save Their Dog Over a Human Stranger
Another research team led by psychologist Richard Topolski tested these moral intuitions using a different scenario. Instead of measuring empathy after reading news stories, they asked people to make an impossible choice. Imagine a runaway bus hurtling toward a person and a dog crossing the street. You can dash out and save one or the other, but not both. Who do you choose?
Researchers varied the identities of both the person and the dog. Person options included a foreign tourist, a hometown stranger, a distant cousin, your best friend, your grandparent, or your sibling. Dog options were either someone else’s pet or your own pet.
Results were stunning. Forty percent of participants said they would save their dog over a foreign tourist. When researchers expanded the human options, kinship became the biggest factor. People would abandon strangers to save family members. But dogs complicated this hierarchy.
Pet ownership creates bonds that rival family relationships. Your dog isn’t just an animal. Many participants viewed their pets as full family members deserving the same moral consideration as human relatives. Someone else’s dog generated less concern, but your own companion animal activated powerful emotional loyalties.
Logic Versus Emotion in Life-or-Death Choices
Topolski’s team asked participants to explain their decisions. People who chose to save humans gave logic-based justifications. They cited principles about human life having greater moral value or importance. They referenced abstract ethical frameworks and universal rules.
People who chose to save their pets gave emotion-based reasons. “I love my pet” drove their decisions more than abstract principles about species hierarchy. They spoke about bonds, loyalty, and personal connection rather than philosophical arguments.
Gender differences emerged here, too. Women were four times more likely to give emotionally laden, care-based reasons for their decisions. Men leaned toward universal principles and logical frameworks. Both groups felt emotional connections to their pets, but women were more willing to prioritize those feelings over abstract moral rules.
These fantasy scenarios don’t predict actual behavior during real emergencies. Someone might say they’d save their dog, then instinctively grab the human when flames surround them. But responses reveal how people think about moral choices and which factors weigh most heavily in their minds.
Cats Probably Get the Same Treatment as Dogs
Levin predicted similar results would emerge for cats and people. “Dogs and cats are family pets,” he said. “These are animals to which many individuals attribute human characteristics.”
Family pet status matters more than specific species. Both dogs and cats fill dependent roles in households. Both receive names, personalities, and anthropomorphic characteristics. Owners describe their pets using the same language they use for children: babies, kids, fur babies.
Companion animal status creates a special category in human thinking. Wild animals don’t trigger the same empathy. Laboratory animals occupy a different moral space. But pets who share our homes and lives become emotionally equivalent to family members for many people.
What Fake Scenarios Reveal About Real Moral Thinking
Cognitive psychologists use hypothetical moral dilemmas to study the human moral sense. These fantasy situations reveal how emotion and reason interact in ethical decisions. They expose differences in moral judgment between groups. They illuminate the neurobiology of morality.
Previous research using similar methods found that humans are natural “speciesists.” Universal moral principles exist, and among the most powerful is “value human life over the lives of non-human animals.” People consistently choose to save humans over animals when both are strangers.
But personal bonds complicate this hierarchy. Love for a pet can override concern for unknown humans. Family relationships trump species membership. Your dog matters more than a stranger, even though that stranger is human and your dog is not.
These findings don’t mean 40% of people would actually let a tourist die to save their dog. Researchers weren’t predicting real-world behavior. They were mapping moral reasoning patterns and identifying which factors influence ethical thinking.
Participants were mostly white college students between the ages of 18 and 25. Levin defended this homogenous sample by explaining that experiments aim to establish cause and effect relationships rather than generalize to large populations. However, he noted no reason to believe results would differ much among college students nationwide.
What Drives Our Deepest Sympathies
Vulnerability, not species, determines who receives our empathy. Helpless creatures activate protective instincts built deep into human psychology. Age matters more than the number of legs. Perceived innocence matters more than DNA.
Adult humans occupy a strange position in this empathy hierarchy. Society expects them to handle threats independently. People assume grown humans made choices that shaped their circumstances. Someone who gets attacked at 30 might have been in the wrong place, made poor decisions, or failed to protect themselves adequately.
Babies and puppies face no such judgment. They exist as pure victims of circumstances beyond their control. Nobody questions whether a one-year-old child should have been more careful. Nobody suggests a puppy brought violence upon itself through poor choices.
Dogs maintain this innocence throughout their lives. Six-year-old dogs remain as blameless as puppies. They never lose their status as dependent beings who need protection. Adult humans, by contrast, must earn sympathy by demonstrating vulnerability that overcomes assumptions about their capability and responsibility.
People care deeply about suffering. But which suffering triggers the strongest response depends less on who we are and more on who is suffering. Young, helpless, and innocent victims capture our hearts. Age beats species every time.
