It was pretty jarring. You’re reading along, fascinated if you’re me, then jarringly reminded of the fact that this was a human being, not a Petri dish. Empathy’s gotta be one of the most important skills for an experimental social psychologist.
Or maybe the exact opposite? I would find it very hard to do research and empathize with the subject of my research at the same time.
This has also just made me realized that this problem with empathizing with my research is actually highly problematic when it comes to the research I am actually doing at the moment.
It's like any of our instinctual responses. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it's in the way.
Setting a broken bone or popping a joint back in to place will hurt right now, but the consequences of not doing it will hurt the person a lot more over time. So you do inflict pain on them right in the moment, which is certainly unpleasant to do, but in the hope that the overall pain and discomfort for them will be significantly lessened.
At least that's how a friend of mine (former firefighter) put it.