NO I'M A FREEEAAAAKK LOCK ME AWAY
I guess lack of empathy is normal in a lot of cases. It just feels weird because it's my family.
How do you feel about those people as people? There's also the Just World Fallacy, and that could be relevant. It's a really interesting area of psychology. Basically people changing their opinion of those who are suffering in order to avoid bad feelings themselves, and it's often counter-intuitive. e.g.
- subject gets electric shock for answering questions wrong. Observers are
neutral towards them as a person. Because the punishment has a clear cause - the wrong answers.
- subject gets electric shock
completely at random, and this is made clear to the observers. In this case, the observers start lowering their estimation of the "self worth" ofthe subject. So in other words if they can't find a rational reason for the shocks, they lower their "value" on that person so that it's "fair" for them to be shocked.
- subject gets electric shocks
given by the observer. Now, you get the same devaluation of the person, execpt much more so. So they've lowered their valuation of them to make the unfair shocks "fair", and again to absolve their guilt for doing so.
This even extends to rape victims. A rape victim in "slutty clothes" gets no negative valuation, because it can be easily rationalized as "you shouldn't have worn those clothes". but a rape victim in
tidy clothes, she actually gets labeled as of lower worth. This was actually found in the studies, and it sort of contradicts a few assumptions we normally make about what's called "victim blaming".
Basically the observers didn't want to accept that just anyone
could be raped at random, they needed to either blame the clothes or blame the person. This suggests a more complex story - the typical "don't dress like that" rape advice serves a
purpose for women. Telling women "things you can do" to protect yourself might actually give them a sense of
agency. People
want to believe they can minimize their risk through choices. e.g. women might not
want to believe that random rapes just happen and there's nothing they can do. Rather than calling "protect yourself" advice "victim-blaming", activists might have this the wrong way around, if you go by the psychology research.