Human empathy is not a hard-wired reflexive response to others’ suffering.

Evidence

Some theorists have argued that organisms have evolved to respond automatically to the emotional states of others (Preston & de Waal, 2002). However, empirical evidence across species calls into question hard-wired reflexive empathy. If people’s emotional lives were automatically triggered by others’ emotional experiences, they would be emotionally exhausted and functionally debilitated by the expressions of pain, grief, fear, anger, sad-ness, frustration, disgust, and suffering by anyone and everyone in sight. Even informal observation reveals that people are hardly consumed by empathy. All too often they respond indifferently or even callously to the suffering of others. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 637

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the vault’s premise that harmful policy support depends on suppressing empathy rather than overriding an immutable instinct.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 637