Agents facilitate one category of human empathy through task difficulty

TL;DR

This study investigates how task difficulty influences human empathy towards agents, finding that higher difficulty increases a specific empathy category, highlighting task design's role in fostering empathy.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that task difficulty, but not content, significantly affects a particular category of human empathy towards agents, providing insights for designing empathetic interactions.

Findings

Higher task difficulty increases a specific empathy category.

Task content (competitive vs. cooperative) has no significant effect.

Pre-task empathy decreases after completing the task.

Abstract

One way to improve the relationship between humans and anthropomorphic agents is to have humans empathize with the agents. In this study, we focused on a task between agents and humans. We experimentally investigated hypotheses stating that task difficulty and task content facilitate human empathy. The experiment was a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with four conditions: task difficulty (high, low) and task content (competitive, cooperative). The results showed no main effect for the task content factor and a significant main effect for the task difficulty factor. In addition, pre-task empathy toward the agent decreased after the task. The ANOVA showed that one category of empathy toward the agent increased when the task difficulty was higher than when it was lower.This indicated that this category of empathy was more likely to be affected by the task. The task itself used can be an important factor when manipulating each category of empathy.