Study Finds People Show More Empathy for Dogs Than Adult Humans

You scroll through your social media feed and stop at a news story about animal abuse. Anger floods through you. Comments beneath the post demand justice, punishment, and retribution. Later that same day, you pass a story about human violence. You scroll past it. Maybe you pause. Maybe you don’t.

Something strange happens inside our brains when we encounter suffering. We feel it differently depending on who is hurting. Scientists at Northeastern University wanted to know why news stories about battered animals seem to generate more outrage than reports of human victims. What they discovered challenges everything we think we know about empathy, morality, and what makes us human.

Spoiler: It’s not that we love dogs more than people. Something else is going on, and it’s far more interesting.

When a Puppy Beats an Adult Human in the Sympathy Stakes

Jack Levin studies serial killers and mass murderers. Arnold Arluke researches human-animal interactions. Together, they noticed a pattern that journalists kept asking them about: why does the public react more strongly to animal cruelty than violence against humans?

Stories about abused dogs flood local news stations with calls. Donations pour into animal rescue organizations. Social media erupts with demands for harsh penalties. Meanwhile, stories about assaulted adults often generate less visceral reactions. People care, but something about the emotional intensity differs.

Levin and Arluke decided to test whether this observation held up under scientific scrutiny. If people really do care more about animals than humans, they want to understand why. If not, they wanted to know what was actually happening beneath the surface of our emotional responses.

Fake News Story Reveals Real Human Nature

Researchers crafted a fake newspaper article for the Boston Globe. Inside the fabricated story, police responded to a vicious attack in Boston’s South End. Someone wielding a baseball bat had beaten a victim, leaving them with broken bones, lacerations, and unconsciousness. Police arrived minutes after the assault. No arrests were made. Every detail in the story stayed identical across versions. Except one: the victim.

Two hundred forty university students each read one version of the article. Some read about a one-year-old child. Others encountered an adult in his thirties. A third group learned about a puppy. A fourth read about a six-year-old dog. Students believed they were reading real news. After finishing, they rated their feelings of empathy toward the victim on an emotional response scale.

Levin and Arluke expected clear results. Either people would care more about animals or they wouldn’t. Science loves simple answers. Instead, they got something far more complex.

Surprise Finding: Age Trumps Species Every Time

The results created an X-shaped pattern on the graph. Statisticians call it an interaction effect. Regular people might call it shocking.

Students felt most distressed by the story about the one-year-old child. Close behind came the puppy. Adult dogs generated high sympathy scores, too. But adult humans? They ranked dead last.

Age mattered more than species. Way more.

Jack Levin explained the findings at the American Sociological Association meeting in 2013: “Contrary to popular thinking, we are not necessarily more disturbed by animal rather than human suffering. Our results indicate a much more complex situation with respect to the age and species of victims, with age being the more important component.”

The national press picked up the story. Headlines screamed about how people care more about dogs than humans. But those headlines missed the actual point. Students didn’t prefer animals over people; they preferred beings they perceived as innocent and helpless, whether those beings had two legs or four.

Children triggered protective instincts. So did puppies. Adult dogs sparked the same response as their younger counterparts. But adult humans? People assumed they could defend themselves.

Empathy scores between the child victim and the puppy victim showed no statistical difference. Let that sink in. A one-year-old human and a young dog generated equal emotional responses.

Why We See Adult Dogs as Giant Puppies

Something happens in our minds when we think about dogs. Adult dogs never “graduate” into independence the way adult humans do. A six-year-old dog and a six-month-old puppy both seem vulnerable in our perception. Both need protection. Both depend on us for survival.

“Age seems to trump species, when it comes to eliciting empathy,” Levin said. “In addition, it appears that adult humans are viewed as capable of protecting themselves while full grown dogs are just seen as larger puppies.”

We apply a different standard to human development. Children require protection. Adolescents begin gaining independence. Adults shoulder responsibility for their own safety. But dogs? We freeze them in eternal childhood. A full-grown German Shepherd weighing 80 pounds still registers as vulnerable in our brains.

Family pets occupy a special category in human psychology. We attribute human characteristics to dogs and cats. We see emotions in their faces. We interpret their behavior through human lenses. When someone hurts a dog, we process it the same way we process violence against a child: an attack on something defenseless.

Adult crime victims lose that automatic sympathy. We ask questions about what happened. Could they have fought back? Why were they in that location? Should they have been more careful? Our brains start calculating responsibility and capability.

Dogs never face those questions. Neither do children. Innocence and helplessness grant them automatic victim status in our moral calculations.

Women Feel It More Than Men

Female participants scored higher than male participants across all four victim scenarios. Women felt more empathy for children, adults, puppies, and dogs than men did.

Scientists have documented this pattern in hundreds of studies. Women consistently show more empathy than men. Women report more concern about animal suffering. Women volunteer more at animal shelters. Women donate more to animal welfare organizations.

But both sexes showed the same basic pattern: more empathy for young and helpless victims than for adults who could theoretically defend themselves.

Sex differences appear in other ways too. When researchers asked people to explain their moral choices, women gave emotion-based reasons four times more often than men. Men relied on logic and reasoning to justify their decisions. Women talked about feelings and relationships.

Scientists who study human-animal interactions have documented these patterns repeatedly. Gender shapes how we relate to both people and animals. Women don’t just feel more empathy. They feel it differently.

Would You Save Your Dog or a Stranger?

Psychologist Richard Topolski took the research further with a different scenario. Imagine an out-of-control bus racing toward a person and a dog crossing the street. You can dash out and save one victim. Not both. Who do you choose?

Topolski varied the identities of both the person and the dog. Sometimes the person was a foreign tourist. Sometimes a distant cousin. Sometimes your sibling. Sometimes your grandparent. Sometimes your best friend.

Dogs came in two categories: someone else’s pet or your pet.

Results stunned researchers. Forty percent of people said they would save their own dog over a foreign stranger. Forty percent. Nearly half of the participants valued their personal relationship with their pet more than the life of an unknown human.

When researchers asked people to explain their choices, patterns emerged. People who chose to save humans gave logic-based justifications. Saving people is the right thing to do. Human life has more value. Society expects us to prioritize human welfare.

People who chose to save their dogs gave emotion-based reasons. I love my pet. My dog is family. I have a relationship with my dog but not with the stranger. Women gave these emotional justifications four times more often than men.

Personal connection drove decisions. People would save family members over strangers. They would save their own dog over someone else’s dog. Kinship mattered. Relationships mattered. Abstract moral principles about human life’s inherent value? Those mattered less than people might expect.

For many pet owners, dogs function as full family members. Not metaphorically. Psychologically. When forced to choose between a loved dog and an unknown human, emotions override species loyalty.

What This Really Tells Us About Human Empathy

We don’t walk around preferring animals to people. We walk around preferring innocence to guilt, helplessness to capability, and relationships to abstractions.

Children trigger our protective instincts because evolution wired us to care for vulnerable young. Dogs hijack that same circuitry. Puppies have big eyes, clumsy movements, and dependent behavior. Adult dogs maintain many of those juvenile traits. Humans bred dogs specifically to retain puppy-like features and behaviors into adulthood.

Scientists call it neoteny: the retention of juvenile characteristics in adult animals. Dogs evolved to push our parental buttons. They succeeded.

Adult humans don’t benefit from the same perceptual tricks. We see adults as capable agents making choices. When bad things happen to adults, we ask what they did to contribute to the situation. We rarely ask what a puppy did to deserve being beaten.

Researchers believe their findings would hold for cats, too. Family pets in general access our parental instincts. We protect things that depend on us. We feel empathy for creatures who can’t defend themselves. Species matters less than perceived vulnerability.

One-year-old children and puppies generated nearly identical empathy scores because they occupy the same psychological space in our minds: innocent, helpless, dependent beings who need us.

Adult humans occupy different psychological territory. We judge them. We assess their choices. We calculate whether they bear responsibility for their circumstances. We don’t automatically grant them victim status.

None of this means people don’t care about adult human suffering. We do. But that caring gets filtered through layers of judgment and assessment that don’t apply to children and dogs.