Influence of anthropomorphic agent on human empathy through games

TL;DR

The paper investigates how anthropomorphic agents influence human empathy through game-like tasks. It conducts two experiments: Study 1 analyzes how task difficulty and task content (competitive vs cooperative) shape empathy toward an empathy agent, finding that higher difficulty increases affective empathy but task content shows no strong effect. Study 2 introduces agent expression and task outcomes, showing that agent expressions sustain and enhance overall empathy and even boost empathic motivation, regardless of success or failure. Together, the results suggest that agent properties, especially expressive cues, are crucial for fostering acceptance of anthropomorphic agents in society and have practical implications for designing empathy-enabled AI and robots. The work highlights the importance of expressive design in human-agent interactions and points to future research on long-term effects and richer expressive modalities.

Abstract

The social acceptance of AI agents, including intelligent virtual agents and physical robots, is becoming more important for the integration of AI into human society. Although the agents used in human society share various tasks with humans, their cooperation may frequently reduce the task performance. One way to improve the relationship between humans and AI agents is to have humans empathize with the agents. By empathizing, humans feel positively and kindly toward agents, which makes it easier to accept them. In this study, we focus on tasks in which humans and agents have various interactions together, and we investigate the properties of agents that significantly influence human empathy toward the agents. To investigate the effects of task content, difficulty, task completion, and an agent's expression on human empathy, two experiments were conducted. The results of the two experiments showed that human empathy toward the agent was difficult to maintain with only task factors, and that the agent's expression was able to maintain human empathy. In addition, a higher task difficulty reduced the decrease in human empathy, regardless of task content. These results demonstrate that an AI agent's properties play an important role in helping humans accept them.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Task scene with empathy agent during low difficulty
• Figure 2: Flowchart of the experiment.
• Figure 3: Main effects results of affective empathy
• Figure 4: Process flow of the experiment.
• Figure 5: Three expressions of the agent.