Empathy in Explanation

TL;DR

This paper presents a computational model that incorporates emotional considerations into explanations, demonstrating that people intuitively factor in emotional impact, such as regret, when explaining to others.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for modeling explanations that considers emotional effects, advancing understanding of social and emotional factors in explanation.

Findings

Model predicts human explanations better when including emotion

People consider emotional impact, like regret, in explanations

Emotion-aware explanations align with human intuition

Abstract

Why do we give the explanations we do? Recent work has suggested that we should think of explanation as a kind of cooperative social interaction, between a why-question-asker and an explainer. Here, we apply this perspective to consider the role that emotion plays in this social interaction. We develop a computational framework for modeling explainers who consider the emotional impact an explanation might have on a listener. We test our framework by using it to model human intuitions about how a doctor might explain to a patient why they have a disease, taking into account the patient's propensity for regret. Our model predicts human intuitions well, better than emotion-agnostic ablations, suggesting that people do indeed reason about emotion when giving explanations.