There are videos of engineers kicking robots to see them recover or self-balance, and people who watching are always like, "OMG why would you kick him?"

And then it takes a second to realize .. wait...that's ..that's just a robot. But our brains make that association because it looks human enough.

So watching that Pleo video; even though I rationally understood what I was feeling, I still felt bad for the dino and I'm glad I felt it. That was just cruel and disturbing. I know I'm feeling bad for a toy, but our brains evolved to have those types of emphatic responses to identify when other animals or humans are in pain -- similar to pain we can experience.

It's a pretty interesting trait, and it's not just purely nurture(vs nature) because we see similar sounds and emphatic reactions on many other mammals.

There are quite a few human beings who don't feel that; who can watch animals or people in pain and not feel anything or have their sounds/crys trigger neurological response. Those people usually grow up to run banks, or become CEOs of multinational conglomerates.