Before Someone Becomes a Killer, They Usually Stop Seeing Other People as Human
Tuesday, August 4, 2026.
The Quiet Beginning of Extraordinary Violence
I’ve admitted this before. I am fascinated by true crime narratives.
Most folks imagine murder as an explosion.
A moment of rage.
A terrible decision.
A weapon.
A siren.
Social science research has a less cinematic imagination.
It suggests that many acts of extraordinary violence begin years earlier—not with a fist or a gun, but with something almost invisible.
A failure of imagination.
Specifically, the inability to experience another human being as fully real.
That may sound abstract until you consider what empathy actually does.
Empathy isn't simply kindness. It is the remarkable psychological ability to remember that another person possesses an inner life every bit as vivid, frightened, hopeful, contradictory, and fragile as your own.
When empathy begins to erode, something subtle happens.
People stop becoming subjects.
They become obstacles.
Property.
Problems.
Sometimes, enemies.
We Live in an Age of Depersonalization
If that sounds uncomfortably familiar, perhaps it should.
We live in an age of depersonalization.
Social media rewards contempt over curiosity.
Politics encourages us to sort strangers into tribes before we've learned their names.
Algorithms flatten complicated human beings into avatars, stereotypes, and profile pictures. We increasingly encounter one another as opinions before we encounter one another as people.
The psychological habit of reducing another human being to a category has become so commonplace that we scarcely notice we're doing it anymore.
Fortunately, contempt on the internet is not the same thing as homicide.
But they begin with the same cognitive mistake.
Someone stops being a person and becomes an object.
Civilizations rarely collapse because everyone suddenly becomes monstrous.
They erode because ordinary people gradually lose the habit of imagining another person's inner world.
What This Study Asked
A new study published in Deviant Behavior approached family homicide from an unusual angle.
Instead of asking why folks kill family members in general, the researchers wondered whether different forms of family murder—killing a spouse, a parent, a child, or a sibling—reflect different psychological profiles.
Their findings suggest they do.
Among the personality characteristics they examined, one stood above the rest: affective deficits—the absence of empathy, guilt, and emotional depth—proved to be the clearest psychological distinction among several forms of family homicide.
Folks who killed their parents showed particularly elevated levels of these emotional deficits, while those who killed their siblings generally displayed the lowest psychopathy scores.
Why This Matters to the Rest of Us
The obvious objection is also the correct one.
Most of us will never encounter murder.
But every one of us encounters the slow erosion of empathy.
Every marriage reaches moments when a spouse becomes "the problem" instead of a person.
Every family experiences the temptation to reduce someone to a single adjective:
The selfish one.
The difficult one.
The addict.
The narcissist.
Healthy people interrupt that process.
They remember that the person standing across the kitchen possesses a history, fears, disappointments, private dreams, and invisible wounds every bit as complicated as their own.
The offenders in this study apparently did not.
That is what makes the research so haunting.
It isn't really asking why people kill.
It is asking what begins to disappear long before violence ever arrives.
And the answer, at least in part, is another person's humanity.
When Empathy Leaves the Room
If the word psychopath conjures up images of Hannibal Lecter smiling over a nice Chianti, we need to recalibrate.
Most psychopaths aren't cinematic villains.
Many are simply people for whom other human beings never acquire much emotional weight.
That's a far more unsettling idea.
Psychologists measure psychopathy by looking at several distinct personality dimensions rather than treating it as a single trait.
Some involve manipulation and deceit. Others reflect impulsivity or a lifelong disregard for rules. But in this study, one dimension towered above the others.
It wasn't charm.
It wasn't impulsiveness.
It wasn't even chronic antisocial behavior.
It was what psychologists call affective deficits—a profound absence of empathy, guilt, remorse, and emotional connection.
Among the four psychopathy dimensions, these emotional deficits most clearly distinguished several forms of family homicide.
Offenders who killed parents scored especially high on this dimension, while those who killed siblings generally showed the lowest overall psychopathy scores.
That finding is worth lingering over.
Hollywood teaches us to fear explosive anger.
Research quietly points us toward to take careful note of emotional emptiness.
Violence is often imagined as passion overflowing its banks.
This research suggests that, in some cases, the greater danger is the river of empathy has run bone dry.
When another person's suffering no longer registers—when guilt no longer interrupts action, when remorse no longer restrains impulse, when affection has quietly packed its bags and left the building—the moral architecture that keeps families intact begins to weaken.
That doesn't mean people with low empathy become killers.
Far from it.
Most never will.
But the study reminds us that empathy isn't merely a pleasant personality trait.
It's a psychological brake.
It slows us down at precisely the moments when anger whispers that another person deserves whatever happens next.
Without that brake, conflict changes character.
The argument is no longer about resolving a disagreement.
It's about eliminating an obstacle.
That's a profound psychological shift.
And it doesn't happen overnight.
No one wakes up one Monday morning and accidentally forgets another person's humanity.
That erosion is usually gradual.
A grievance rehearsed for years.
A resentment polished until it shines.
A family member who slowly ceases to exist as a son, a daughter, a spouse, or a parent and instead becomes the disappointment... the burden... the embarrassment... the enemy.
Long before violence becomes physical, it often becomes psychological.
The first casualty is not a life.
It is the ability to imagine another person's inner world.
That may be the most chilling lesson hidden inside this research.
Not that empathy always prevents tragedy.
But that tragedy becomes far easier when empathy quietly excuses itself from the conversation.
Not All Family Killers Think Alike
One of the more surprising findings in this study is that family homicide is not psychologically uniform.
That sounds obvious.
It isn't.
We have a habit of placing people who commit horrific crimes into one mental folder labeled monster and sliding the drawer shut.
It's emotionally satisfying. It also saves us from having to think too hard.
Psychology, unfortunately, insists on thinking.
The researchers found meaningful differences depending on who was killed.
Those who murdered their parents showed the highest levels of emotional detachment.
Those who killed their children also displayed pronounced affective deficits.
Intimate partner homicide offenders showed relatively stronger interpersonal manipulation and antisocial traits.
By contrast, people who killed siblings generally displayed the lowest psychopathy scores across the four personality dimensions measured.
That last finding deserves attention.
Sibling homicide may arise less from profound emotional coldness than from explosive conflicts over power, money, inheritance, longstanding rivalries, or situational rage.
The researchers caution that these cases may follow a different psychological pathway altogether.
There's an important lesson hidden here.
Families don't produce a single kind of conflict.
Every relationship carries its own emotional grammar.
The resentments between spouses are not the resentments between parents and children.
The rivalries between siblings are not the wounds between fathers and sons.
Love may be universal.
Family conflict never is.
Every Relationship Has Its Own Psychological Weather
Family therapists learn this lesson early.
Children don't argue with parents for the same reasons spouses argue with one another.
Siblings carry decades of comparison, competition, birth order, and perceived favoritism.
Parents and children often struggle over autonomy, dependence, disappointment, and identity.
Romantic partners fight over attachment, trust, betrayal, intimacy, and power.
The conflicts may sound similar from the outside.
Inside the relationship, they feel entirely different.
That's why the researchers were wise to separate these forms of family homicide instead of treating them as one phenomenon.
Doing so revealed something psychologists often discover:
The broad category is usually less interesting than the specific story.
It's one reason therapists ask, "Tell me what happened," instead of assuming they already know.
The Danger of One-Size-Fits-All Psychology
There's a broader lesson here, and it extends well beyond forensic science.
We increasingly live in a culture that wants grand theory explanations.
Everything becomes trauma.
Everything becomes attachment.
Everything becomes narcissism.
Everything becomes ADHD.
Reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate.
The same outward behavior may emerge from entirely different psychological landscapes.
Two people can shout.
One is terrified of abandonment.
The other is desperate for control.
Two siblings can stop speaking.
One feels betrayed.
The other feels invisible.
Behavior is the headline.
Psychology is the story beneath it.
This study quietly reminds us that even among the most extreme acts imaginable, motivation remains complicated.
Human beings rarely do terrible things for identical reasons.
Which means understanding them requires something our culture is rapidly losing:
The patience to distinguish.
Not excuse.
Not justify.
Simply distinguish.
Because if psychology teaches us anything, it's that the moment we stop making distinctions...
...we stop understanding people.
The Most Dangerous Thing You Can Do to Someone Is Stop Being Curious
Here's the uncomfortable implication of this research.
The psychological opposite of violence isn't love.
It's curiosity.
That sounds almost absurd until you think about how relationships actually unravel.
Couples rarely wake up one morning hating each other.
Instead, they stop asking questions.
They stop wondering why their partner reacted so strongly.
They stop caring what the other person is afraid of.
Eventually, they stop believing there's anything left to discover.
Curiosity quietly packs its bags.
Judgment moves in.
The husband is no longer a complicated human being carrying decades of hopes, disappointments, and private grief.
He's "the narcissist."
The wife is no longer a person trying, and sometimes failing, to make sense of her own emotional life.
She's "the problem."
The teenage son becomes "the screw-up."
The aging father becomes "the burden."
The addicted daughter becomes "the disappointment."
Notice what has happened.
The relationship hasn't merely become conflictual.
It has become psychologically flat.
The other person has been compressed into a label.
That's one of the reasons I grow uneasy whenever psychology becomes too fond of diagnostic shorthand.
Labels are useful.
Reductionism is not.
A diagnosis may describe someone's struggles. But it should never replace their humanity.
The families in this study represent an unimaginably tragic endpoint, not an inevitable progression.
Most families that experience anger, estrangement, or even abuse never descend into lethal violence.
The researchers themselves caution that these findings come from a relatively small, retrospective sample and should be interpreted carefully.
But the psychological principle scales surprisingly well.
The moment another person becomes only a diagnosis...
Only a stereotype...
Only an obstacle...
Only the villain in the story you've been rehearsing...
...you've begun dismantling one of the mind's most important safety mechanisms.
Empathy requires imagination.
Curiosity keeps imagination alive.
That's why experienced therapists spend far less time deciding who's right than helping family members to become curious again.
Curiosity interrupts certainty.
It complicates resentment.
It reminds us that every human being is carrying a story we cannot fully see.
Violence begins when another person's inner life disappears.
Healing often begins when we become interested in it again.
The Real Lesson Isn't About Murder
That's why I don't think this blog post is ultimately about homicide.
It's really about the totality of human civilization.
Every functioning society depends on millions of small psychological decisions that never make the evening news.
To pause before judging.
To imagine another person's point of view.
To recognize pain where anger is easier to see.
To remember that the person across the dinner table, across the office, or across the political aisle possesses an interior life every bit as rich and conflicted as our own.
Those habits don't eliminate conflict.
They humanize it.
The researchers identified affective deficits as the clearest psychological boundary among several forms of family homicide.
That's an important forensic finding.
But there's a broader lesson hiding beneath it.
Empathy isn't simply a pleasant emotion.
It's one of civilization's oldest technologies.
It allows families to survive disappointment.
It allows marriages to survive betrayal.
It allows communities to survive disagreement.
Without it, conflict has nothing left to restrain it except exhaustion.
Perhaps that's the quiet warning embedded in this research.
Long before people commit extraordinary acts of violence...
They usually stop performing the ordinary act of seeing another human being as fully human.
And every day we resist that temptation—even in our smallest arguments—we do something far more important than win.
We help keep civilization intact.
The Ordinary Work of Civilization
The researchers weren't trying to write a philosophy of family life.
They were studying murder.
Yet good science often tells us more than it intended.
This paper quietly reminds us that civilization doesn't survive because most people are unusually kind.
It survives because most people continue to recognize another person's humanity, even when anger would make forgetting easier.
That recognition is rarely dramatic.
It happens in kitchens.
Across dinner tables.
Inside therapists' offices.
During apologies.
During disappointments.
During ordinary Tuesday arguments that never become Wednesday tragedies.
Every day we decide whether another person is still worthy of our curiosity.
Every day we decide whether their inner life still matters.
Most of us make the right decision so often we barely notice we're making it.
Perhaps that's the real miracle.
The first casualty of violence is another person's humanity.
The first act of love is refusing to let it disappear.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Sohn, J., Raine, A., & Hong, Y.-O. (2026). The role of psychopathic traits in subtypes of family homicide.Deviant Behavior.