Psychology, Empathy, Moral Disengagement, and the Evolutionary Origins of Cruelty
The Question That Haunts Me
Why do people hit and hurt animals, violently, deliberately, without reason?
I can understand violence between humans, even if I don’t accept it. People fight out of fear, out of ideology, out of blind loyalty to ideas that others don’t share. But animals? Small animals? With weapons?
I’ve seen too many videos, cats, dogs, wild animals, creatures far smaller than us, being harmed not because someone was scared or needed to protect themselves. Soldiers with guns. People with stones. Cruelty filmed and shared like entertainment.
I don’t understand. Why do humans have that need?
We are the species that asks about meaning, that wonders about consciousness, that debates what life is worth. How is any of that different in animals? They live. They feel. They breathe. And still, people do this? They see an innocent life, they see nature, and instead of respecting it, they want to conquer or destroy it.
It makes me not only sad but physically pained. I feel something twist inside my body when I think about it, these sick, dark, disgusting actions. Not only against other people (not that that is acceptable), but against small animals that cannot fight back. Animals that don’t have weapons or societies to protect them.
Why so much anger? What do they need to achieve with that? What are they trying to feel or understand?
What Psychology Tells Us: Nine Motivations for Animal Cruelty
The foundational research on this topic comes from Kellert and Felthous, who in 1985 studied both criminals and non-criminals and identified nine distinct motivations for animal cruelty.
These include exercising dominance and control over another living being, retaliating against the animal for something it did, prejudice against a specific species or breed deemed “unworthy,” using the animal as a vehicle for expressing aggression, deliberately building one’s own capacity for violence, deriving entertainment from suffering, harming someone’s animal to hurt the owner, redirecting rage from an unavailable target to an easier one, and, in the most disturbing cases, deriving pleasure from inflicting pain itself.
Each motivation is different. Each requires a different response from both the legal and the health system. There is no single “type” of person who hurts animals, there is a complex matrix of psychological motivations, individual histories, and social risk factors.
The Mechanisms That Make Cruelty Possible
Moral Disengagement
Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement describes the social-cognitive processes that temporarily suppress a person’s internal moral controls. These processes enable individuals to engage in unethical behaviour while maintaining their moral self-image and avoiding self-reproach. People who commit cruelty don’t experience themselves as monsters. They construct mental frameworks, stories, justifications, reframings, that make their actions feel “acceptable” to themselves.
Empathy Deficits, Both Innate and Learned
Neurobiologically, cruelty involves a complex interplay of brain regions. The amygdala drives emotional responses like anger or fear. The prefrontal cortex regulates moral decision-making. In sadistic individuals, the reward system, particularly the ventral striatum, may activate when witnessing others’ pain. Empathy relies on the anterior cingulate cortex and insula, which help us feel another’s suffering. Deficits in these areas, whether innate (as in psychopathy) or learned through repeated desensitisation, can amplify cruel behaviour.
Power and Control
In domestic settings, people who harm animals often do so to demonstrate power, express rage, punish, terrorise, and teach submission. The smallness and defencelessness of the animal is not incidental, it is the point. People who feel powerless in their own lives sometimes seek the one relationship where they can be absolutely dominant. Both animal cruelty and bullying have been linked to a desire for power and a lack of cognitive empathy.
Trauma Cycles
Research has found that animals are often embedded in children’s broader psychological frameworks. Children’s interactions with animals are informed by their learned experiences and often reflective of their broader environment. Children may interpret animals as less threatening and possibly as “safer” targets on which to rehearse behaviours they would otherwise inhibit. Family violence, particularly paternal abuse and alcoholism, was significantly more common among aggressive criminals with a history of childhood cruelty toward animals.
Desensitisation
Engaging in cruelty, especially repeatedly, can dull a person’s emotional response to suffering. Over time, this makes it easier to escalate to more severe forms of aggression. This is why animal cruelty is sometimes described as an “emotional rehearsal” for further harmful behaviours.
The Spectacle: Filmed Cruelty and Group Dynamics
When cruelty is filmed and shared, additional psychological dynamics come into play: social performance (proving toughness or dominance to a peer group), the dehumanising effect of viewing the act through a screen, and, in militarised contexts, institutional desensitisation. The filming also connects to Bandura’s concept of diffusion of responsibility. When an audience laughs, when likes accumulate, cruelty gets reframed as entertainment and individual moral responsibility dissolves into the crowd.
Can People Without Empathy Learn It?
This was another question that kept circling in my mind: are there cases where people without empathy at all were able to understand what empathy is and feel something for other people?
The Empathy Switch
A brain imaging study conducted in the Netherlands by Christian Keysers and his team at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience showed that individuals with psychopathy have reduced empathy while witnessing the pain of others, but when explicitly asked to empathise, they can activate their empathy. The study involved 18 participants with psychopathy and a control group of 26. When the psychopathic participants were instructed to try to empathise while watching videos of human hands touching in loving or painful ways, their brains showed the same level of activity in empathy-related areas as the control group.
Keysers concluded that psychopathic individuals do have empathy, it is just not always switched on. The therapeutic implication is important: the goal may not be to teach psychopaths empathy from scratch, but to help them learn to keep that empathy active all the time. To make something that requires conscious effort into something automatic.
The Case of James Fallon: A “Prosocial Psychopath”
While studying brain scans of serial killers at UC Irvine, neuroscientist James Fallon was simultaneously running an Alzheimer’s study using brain scans from his own family as controls. He discovered that his own brain showed the same patterns as the serial killers. Genetic testing revealed he had high-risk alleles for aggression, violence, and low empathy, including a variant of the MAO-A gene linked with aggressive behaviour.
He eventually concluded he was indeed a psychopath, just a “prosocial” one. After learning this about himself, he began consciously inhibiting behaviours that could be emotionally harmful to others. He became more considerate and learned to “re-love” people by admiring them. His story illustrates something crucial: biology is not destiny. His early nurturing likely had powerful protective effects.
Can Empathy Be Developed?
Programmes emphasising emotional regulation and mindfulness have shown promise in helping individuals with psychopathic characteristics recognise and relate to others’ emotional states. Empathy training involving role-playing or narrative techniques has enabled some individuals to connect better with others’ feelings. However, it may be most effective when started early, before violence has become a way of life. Researcher Essi Viding at UCL London has shown that a callous, unemotional subgroup of children with conduct disorder already seems to lack spontaneous empathy.
As Arielle Baskin-Sommers at Yale has noted, the difficulty is not that psychopaths lack empathy entirely, but that they lack the natural ability to do it easily. The fact that this ability seems to change depending on the situation is, in her view, a promising sign.
But What About People Who Do Have Empathy?
This is the part that shook me the most: what if people have empathy and still commit these actions? Can someone feel empathy and then still choose cruelty?
The answer, according to the research, is yes. And it is far more common than we want to believe.
Bandura himself stated directly that large-scale inhumanities are often perpetrated by people who are compassionate in other aspects of their lives. They can even behave compassionately and cruelly at the same time, depending on whom they include and exclude in their category of humanity.
This is precisely how “good” people behave “badly.” It is not that they are incapable of emotional empathy, but that they are able to employ psychological manoeuvres that disengage their moral self-sanctions and short-circuit emotional responses, including empathy, under certain circumstances.
Bandura’s Eight Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement
Bandura identified eight specific cognitive mechanisms that allow people with functioning moral systems to bypass them. These are moral justification (“it’s for a good cause”), euphemistic labelling (calling torture “enhanced interrogation”), advantageous comparison (“others do worse”), displacement of responsibility (“I was just following orders”), diffusion of responsibility (“everyone was doing it”), distortion of consequences (“no one was really hurt”), dehumanisation (viewing the victim as less than sentient), and attribution of blame (“the dog bit first”).
Applied to animal cruelty, these mechanisms explain how someone can harm an animal and still see themselves as a decent person. “The cat was feral, it was a pest.” “It’s just pest control.” “At least I’m not as bad as factory farms.” “My sergeant told us to shoot the dogs.” “It’s just an animal, it doesn’t really feel pain like we do.”
How Context Overrides Character
Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment, argued that the line between good and evil is permeable, any of us can move across it. In the Milgram Experiment of 1961, sixty-five per cent of participants administered what they believed was the highest voltage of 450 volts, despite the learner’s obvious discomfort. These were ordinary people. Over time, participants began to devalue the learners, calling them “worthless” and “worthy of punishment.”
Zimbardo identified how people are seduced into harmful behaviour: provide an ideology to justify beliefs, make people take a small first step toward harm and then gradually increase, make those in charge seem like a “just authority,” and diffuse responsibility so that no one feels individually accountable.
Empathy Is Selective by Default
Empathic responsiveness is most salient for those with whom we identify. The flip side is that for those we don’t identify with, including animals, especially unfamiliar ones, the restraining effect of empathy is weaker or absent entirely. Most people live with a moral boundary around their empathy. Their pet dog is inside the circle. A stray cat may or may not be. A wild animal probably is not. That circle can expand or contract depending on culture, mood, group pressure, ideological framing, and individual moral development.
The Hopeful Counter-Finding
Research has found that empathy, spirituality, and resilience are weakly but negatively correlated with moral disengagement, meaning the more empathy someone develops and practises, the harder it becomes to disengage morally. Furthermore, moral disengagement fully mediated the relationship between empathy and violent antisocial behaviour. This means that empathy alone does not prevent violence. It prevents violence by making moral disengagement harder to activate.
The defence against cruelty is not just feeling empathy. It is making that empathy resistant to being overridden.
The Evolutionary Origins: Where Does Empathy Come From?
The key researcher here is Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist based at Emory University. In his 2008 paper in the Annual Review of Psychology, he argued that empathy evolved for kin and close social partners. His studies on primates demonstrate empathy’s presence across species, chimpanzees console distressed peers, but also its limits, which are often confined to in-groups. A 2024 review in Biological Reviews confirmed this pattern.
De Waal’s evolutionary model proposes that empathic behaviours first evolved for kin, then gradually extended to less related kin, mates, unrelated individuals of the same clan, and eventually others.
Neurochemical evidence supports this. Studies indicate that oxytocin, the so-called “bonding hormone”, does not make you kind to everyone. It promotes in-group altruism, ethnic in-group preference, and protection of vulnerable in-group members, but potentially more hostility or indifference toward outsiders.
Peter Singer, in his classic work The Expanding Circle, argued that altruism began as a genetically based drive to protect one’s kin and community members but has developed into a consciously chosen ethic with an expanding circle of moral concern. He demonstrated that human ethics cannot be explained by biology alone. It is our capacity for reasoning that makes moral progress possible, generalising or universalising our altruistic tendencies beyond the groups we are biologically inclined to care about.
De Waal himself confirmed that expansion is possible but requires effort. All these tendencies are inborn, he noted, but they are all subject to environmental influences. Nothing is written in stone. Empathy is trainable and can be expanded.
A Challenging Perspective
Some researchers challenge the standard view by arguing that empathy may not have evolved to support altruism at all. Armin Schulz at the University of Kansas suggests that empathy might have evolved to support existing egoistic dispositions, helping you predict when someone is about to attack you, manipulate someone, figure out who is weak, detect lying, or gain social advantage.
The ability to feel what others feel is a tool. And like any tool, it can be used for cooperation or for exploitation. A con artist reads emotions brilliantly. A manipulative person uses empathy to find exactly where to hurt you. A predator uses it to identify vulnerable targets.
If this view is even partly true, it means empathy and cruelty are not opposites on a single scale. They can coexist in the same person, because the capacity to understand what another being feels does not automatically produce the motivation to protect that being from pain.
The truth is probably somewhere in between: empathy likely evolved under multiple selection pressures simultaneously, some prosocial, some self-serving. Which aspect dominates in any given person depends on development, environment, and individual neurology.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
I started this research with a burning, almost physical question: why? And while I found answers, many of them painful to read, I also found something that gave me hope.
Empathy is not fixed. It can grow. It can expand. The moral circle that determines who we care about is not drawn in permanent ink. It takes effort, it takes awareness, it takes the willingness to look at uncomfortable truths about human nature, but it can be done.
The defence against cruelty is not just feeling empathy in the moment. It is building a kind of empathy that resists being overridden, by ideology, by group pressure, by the convenient stories we tell ourselves to look away.
If you are someone who feels physical pain when thinking about animal suffering, you are not weak. You are not overreacting. You are carrying something important: an empathy that refuses to be switched off. And that matters more than you know.
Resources
If you witness animal cruelty in the Netherlands:
Call 144 (“Red een dier”, Save an animal) to reach the Dierenpolitie (Animal Police), or report anonymously through Meld Misdaad Anoniem at 0800-7000.
If you live somewhere else:
Reporting works differently from country to country, so the safest first step is your local police, especially if an animal is in immediate danger. For guidance on what to do and who to contact wherever you are, FOUR PAWS International has a clear guide: What to do if you recognise abuse of animals. Most countries also have a national animal welfare organisation, like the RSPCA in the UK, that can help. To find the one where you live, Wikipedia keeps a country-by-country list of animal welfare organisations covering more than fifty countries.
Organisations doing important work:
De Dierenbescherming (dierenbescherming.nl), Animal Rights NL (animalrights.nl), AAP (aap.eu) for exotic animal rescue, and local Dierenambulance services.
For further reading:
Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy (2009). Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect (2007) and his TED Talk “The Psychology of Evil.” Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain (2011). James Fallon, The Psychopath Inside (2013). Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle (1981/2011).
Research centres:
The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam (nin.nl), home of Keysers’ Social Brain Lab. The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley (greatergood.berkeley.edu) for accessible articles on empathy research.
This post was compiled from a deep research conversation. The questions are mine. The research helped me understand, even when the answers were hard to sit with. I hope it helps you understand too.
With love, Elli
