Killing which averts suffering: the role of norms and empathy

屠宰场工人和屠夫宰杀动物准备食物，农民宰杀牲畜，兽医减轻痛苦。士兵在战争中杀害其他人类，警察或保安保护公众，医生实施合法的安乐死。研究表明，这些任务可能会面临挑战，甚至会造成创伤。该项目旨在测试人们学习社会支持的姑息杀戮以避免痛苦及其神经基础的过程，重点是规范和同理心痛苦。它将专注于两个核心样本：兽医，他们必须对动物实施安乐死；维多利亚州的卫生从业者，那里的法律变化将在2019年年中引入“自愿协助死亡”。它将调查从业者是如何学习姑息杀戮的，以及这对同理心和认同感等心理变量有什么影响。它将对围绕生死决策的社会影响产生新的理解，为政策制定者提供信息的证据基础，并帮助寻求管理困境和应对快速变化的、有争议的政策变化的机构和从业者。

Abattoir workers and butchers kill animals to prepare food, farmers to cull stock, and veterinarians to alleviate suffering. Soldiers kill other humans in war, police or security guards to protect the public, and doctors to enact legal euthanasia. Research shows that these tasks can be confronting, and even traumatic. This project aims to test the processes through which people learn socially supported palliative killing to avert suffering and their neural underpinnings, with a focus on norms and empathic distress. It will focus on two core samples: veterinarians, who must euthanize animals, and health practitioners in Victoria, where legal changes will introduce ‘voluntary assisted dying’ in mid-2019. It will investigate how practitioners learn palliative killing, and what the impact is on psychological variables such as empathy and identity. It will generate new understandings of social influence around life and death decisions, provide an evidence basis to inform policy makers, and help institutions and practitioners seeking to manage distress and respond to fast-moving, controversial policy changes.