Some people literally just don’t have that connection automatically brought up in their brains. Speaking of, why is that the case? Why is it some people don’t have those kind of responses?

Like, unrelated to the original topic, I recently realized many people I know are able to be rude/hurtful towards others despite the fact that if they witnessed that same interaction as an outside observer it would have made them feel angry or feel empathy for the victim.

I’ve realized it’s not really a choice. Like I bet you didn’t have to purposefully decide “Everytime I think about meat I want to think about the slaughter that made it” your brain just started doing that automatically.

But its not the same as empathy (or at least it’s a different kind of empathy).

You feel bad via empathy for the animal cruelty that likely went into the meal, but that’s only because seeing the meat brought back memories of those movies or other knowledge about meat production. The feeling bad is empathy, but the automatic connection between meat and the slaughter is just a memory association. It’s the automatic memory association that kicks off the empathy, without it, even if one can feel empathy for others, the reaction wouldn’t happen.

I feel like that negative association is the part that’s more lacking in society than empathy itself. I feel like if you took a random person and made them watch someone kill a cow, chances are high they would feel bad for the cow. But if the association between murder and meat doesn’t form in their heads they’ll probably not feel bad eating beef because their brain didn’t bring up the connection.

Do you know if there is a word for that sort of automatic memory recall or a way to try and create those in people? Because I feel like discovering how to make those associations stick would be extremely useful in many circumstances.