Reply #83: Bobbo sent me the following article excerpt. Read it and weep:

[Leopolds Ghost]

"In the research of Fisk and her colleagues, people were asked how different social groups are viewed by their society. When asked a series of questions about social warmth and the competency of different social and ethnic groups, the answers clustered around four emotional responses: pity, envy, pride, and disgust. For example, people routinely reach to the homeless with disgust. This is puzzling enough. You might have thought people would pity the homeless, empathize with their position, and feel sorry for them. Not at all. And in a functional MRI study, when study participants were presented with pictures of members from each social and ethnic group, the medial prefrontal cortex--the site that registers the potential for an object's social action--popped for all but one group: the homeless. The homeless maybe seen as human, but not fully so, not as social actors." The Empathy Gap by J.D. Trout 2009 p. 30