Do You Feel an Animal’s Distress Deeply Enough to Call It Your Own?
Guest Contributor
When news breaks about animals like Harambe the gorilla or Cecil the lion, public reaction can be intense and deeply emotional. Social media fills with heartfelt comments, petitions, and debates about how humans treat other species. At first glance, it can seem as if people care more about the suffering of animals than about one another. A new study from Penn State University takes a careful look at that assumption and uncovers a more nuanced story about human empathy and how context shapes it. The research explores a central question in empathy science: Are people more willing to empathize with animals or with other humans?
The work, led by Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology and senior research associate at Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute, shows that the answer depends on how the choice is framed. The overall mood of the findings is thoughtful and complex rather than simple or sentimental. Cameron and his team did not set out to prove that humans are cold toward one another or that animals automatically win our sympathy. Instead, they investigated when and why people choose to engage in empathy in the first place.
In this research, empathy is not just feeling bad for someone in a general way. The team defined empathy as the process of thinking about another living being’s suffering and experiences as if they were one’s own. That might mean not only recognizing that someone is sad after an argument with a friend, but actively imagining that person’s feelings and sharing in their emotional world. Applying that same process to animals raises interesting questions, since animal minds are not identical to human minds. Some theorists argue that this difference could make it harder for people to feel genuine empathy for nonhuman creatures.
The Penn State team designed their studies to test both intuition and effort. In the first experiment, they recruited 193 participants and used a specialized empathy selection task developed in Cameron’s Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab. On each trial, people had to choose between empathizing with a human stranger or empathizing with an animal, in this case a koala bear. If they chose the human, they saw a photograph of a college aged adult and were asked to mentally share this person’s experience. If they chose the koala, they were shown a photo of the animal and received the same instructions, focused on sharing the koala’s experience as best they could.
When humans and animals were placed in direct competition like this, people tended to choose other humans. Participants explicitly reported that empathizing with animals felt more challenging. According to Cameron, this belief that animal empathy was harder seemed to drive their choices. It appears that for many individuals, trying to understand a mind that feels unlike their own felt more effortful than imagining the experience of another person. Faced with a direct either or decision, they favored the option that seemed easier.
I found this detail striking because it highlights a subtle but important idea. Empathy is not only about whom we care about in the abstract, but also about how much mental work we think it will take to enter another being’s perspective. The first study suggests that when people feel that animal empathy is more cognitively demanding, they might shy away from it in a situation where animals and humans are competing for their attention.
The story shifted once that sense of competition was removed. In a second pair of studies, with groups of 192 and 197 participants, the researchers separated decisions about human and animal empathy into different tasks. In one task, participants could choose either to empathize with a person or to remain detached and simply describe the person. In another task, run separately, they faced the same choice but with an animal instead of a human.
Once humans and animals were no longer presented as competing options, people behaved differently. When they considered whether to empathize with a human stranger or instead just describe that person in a neutral, detached way, they often chose to avoid empathy altogether. This pattern aligns with previous work from Cameron’s lab, which has found that many people choose to steer away from empathy when they can. Empathy can be emotionally taxing, and some individuals may prefer to observe without fully engaging.
For animals, however, participants did not show the same level of avoidance. When the choice was between empathizing with an animal and describing the animal, people were more willing to take the empathic route. According to Cameron, once decisions about humans and animals were decoupled, participants were actually more likely to choose empathy for an animal than for a human. This does not necessarily mean that they valued animals more than people. Instead, it indicates that their reluctance to engage in empathy was weaker in the animal-focused context.
Together, these findings suggest that context plays a central role in empathy decisions. When people feel that they must pick a side and choose whether to care about a human or an animal, they generally favor humans, especially if they believe empathizing with an animal will be harder. When that sense of competition disappears, people are more open to emotionally connecting with animals and in some cases show a clear preference for animal empathy over human empathy.
The implications extend beyond the lab and into public discussions about environmental policies, land use, and human relationships with other species. Cameron noted that if people view choices about empathy as a zero sum contest between humans and animals, this framing may push them toward defending human interests. For example, a policy dispute that is presented as a stark choice between using a parcel of land for human activities or conserving it for wildlife could nudge public opinion in favor of people, simply because the issue is framed as a clash.
On the other hand, the research hints that thoughtful communication could change how these choices are perceived. If conversations about conservation and environmental decisions can be shaped so that empathy does not feel like a competition, people may be more willing to consider the experiences of animals. Managing empathy, in this sense, is not about forcing people to care, but about recognizing how framing, perceived difficulty, and context influence their willingness to step into another being’s emotional world.
The Penn State team, which also included psychology professor Janet Swim, rural sociology assistant professor and Rock Ethics Institute research associate Robert Chiles, and graduate students Michael Lengieza and Eliana Hadjiandreou, emphasizes that more research is needed. The current studies focused on a specific animal and a particular group of participants. Future work could explore whether similar patterns appear with different species, cultures, or policy debates.
Still, this research provides a valuable reminder. Empathy is not a fixed trait that automatically flows to the most deserving target. It is a choice, influenced by expectations about effort, by whether options are framed as rivals, and by how we imagine the minds of others, human and nonhuman alike. Understanding these dynamics can help inform more compassionate communication about the lives, needs, and vulnerabilities of both people and animals.