Empathy is not one switch. It is a stack: feeling with someone, seeing their view, and (later) judging actions against an inner sense of right and wrong. Most of that stack is learned as brains and norms mature; systems can aim it without erasing it.

Nunner-Winkler & Sodian (1988, Child Development): young children often tied a wrongdoer’s feelings to outcomes; older ones more to moral features; only after ~6 did a happy wrongdoer read as worse than a sorry one. Source: Children’s understanding of moral emotions (JSTOR).

We say we love choice, but past a point it turns on us. When options multiply and stakes rise, choice stops feeling like freedom and starts to feel like anxiety. We still reach for the story that we are in charge, even when we hand the real work to someone else.

Leotti, Iyengar, and Ochsner (2010) argue the pull toward choice and perceived control runs deep enough to look biologically motivated (choice rewarding, losing it aversive; corticostriatal circuitry implicated). Source: Born to Choose (PMC).