Social Robots as Social Proxies for Fostering Connection and Empathy Towards Humanity

TL;DR

This work investigates whether social robots can act as asynchronous social platforms to foster empathy toward humanity by sharing stories from different people. It designs a social support companion that retrieves emotionally resonant narratives and guides reflection, operating as a social proxy that transmits stories from narrators to users. In a real-world deployment with 40 robot stations over two weeks, qualitative interviews reveal mechanisms—such as identifying connections across stories and exposing diverse perspectives—that increase connection and empathy. The study provides actionable design guidelines and five principles for building social proxy robots, emphasizing embodiment, non-judgment, long-term memory, adaptive conversation, and clear story ownership.

Abstract

Despite living in an increasingly connected world, social isolation is a prevalent issue today. While social robots have been explored as tools to enhance social connection through companionship, their potential as asynchronous social platforms for fostering connection towards humanity has received less attention. In this work, we introduce the design of a social support companion that facilitates the exchange of emotionally relevant stories and scaffolds reflection to enhance feelings of connection via five design dimensions. We investigate how social robots can serve as "social proxies" facilitating human stories, passing stories from other human narrators to the user. To this end, we conduct a real-world deployment of 40 robot stations in users' homes over the course of two weeks. Through thematic analysis of user interviews, we find that social proxy robots can foster connection towards other people's experiences via mechanisms such as identifying connections across stories or offering diverse perspectives. We present design guidelines from our study insights on the use of social robot systems that serve as social platforms to enhance human empathy and connection.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: We deployed 40 in-home social robots as social platforms connecting the stories told by participants to other peoples' experiences to understand how robot story sharing method affects human connection and empathy.
• Figure 2: Interaction design phases, with examples from a participants' session shown in blue.
• Figure 3: (a) System overview of the robot station, which includes a tablet, Intel NUC computer, USB microphone, web camera, and Jibo social robot mounted together via a custom stand. (b) Stories are presented to the user on the tablet feed.
• Figure 4: We visualize the topics of stories the robot can share from the EmpathicStories dataset (obtained with UMAP of ada-002 embeddings). This demonstrates the depth and breadth of stories covering a variety of vulnerable topics such as mental health, relationships, and life changes collected from social media, podcasts, and crowdworkers' stories.
• Figure 5: Study materials provided to participants