Hearing victims’ trauma accounts drives empathy-workers to dehumanize the condemned

Evidence

However, the personal transformation from moral engagement to moral disengagement suggests a more complex process. In the course of providing ameliorative services, support personnel hear the families of the victim recount the brutal ways in which their loved ones were murdered. Repeated exposure to graphic accounts of heinous crimes can gradually instill revulsion toward the inmates. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2063

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The counselor who began by humanizing inmates but becomes disgusted by them after repeated exposure to victims’ testimony is a powerul moral-collapse story; the revulsion is triggered not by the killing itself but by the victims’ narratives.
• DEEPTHINKING: Empathy directed at victims is converted into dehumanization of perpetrators — a mechanism with implications far beyond prisons, e.g. in journalism, activism, and clinical settings.