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Empathy
"Here is our first lesson in virtue from the medieval West: It was not reading novels, but reciting the Psalms, that first trained ancient and medieval Christians in the practice of imagining the world from another's perspective."
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"If, as Steven Pinker suggests, it was reading that enabled the kind of empathy that we now associate with being civilized, this was the reading practice upon which western civilization depended for over a thousand years."
~Rachel Fulton Brown
Empathy seems to be a learned attribute. It's reasonable to assume that it was only recently learned by humans (cf millennia of war &c). It's certainly not innate - I often see a family out, with younger child crying most plaintively, the older one completely unconcerned.
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