Ovsyannikova Dariya, de Mello Victoria Oldemburgo, Inzlicht Michael
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Commun Psychol. 2025 Jan 10;3(1):4. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00182-6.
Empathy connects us but strains under demanding settings. This study explored how third parties evaluated AI-generated empathetic responses versus human responses in terms of compassion, responsiveness, and overall preference across four preregistered experiments. Participants (N = 556) read empathy prompts describing valenced personal experiences and compared the AI responses to select non-expert or expert humans. Results revealed that AI responses were preferred and rated as more compassionate compared to select human responders (Study 1). This pattern of results remained when author identity was made transparent (Study 2), when AI was compared to expert crisis responders (Study 3), and when author identity was disclosed to all participants (Study 4). Third parties perceived AI as being more responsive-conveying understanding, validation, and care-which partially explained AI's higher compassion ratings in Study 4. These findings suggest that AI has robust utility in contexts requiring empathetic interaction, with the potential to address the increasing need for empathy in supportive communication contexts.
同理心将我们联系在一起，但在苛刻的环境下会受到影响。本研究通过四项预先注册的实验，探讨了第三方如何根据同情心、反应能力和总体偏好来评估人工智能生成的同理心回应与人类回应。参与者（N = 556）阅读了描述有正负情感的个人经历的同理心提示，并将人工智能的回应与选定的非专家或专家人类的回应进行比较。结果显示，与选定的人类回应者相比，人工智能的回应更受青睐，且被评为更具同情心（研究1）。当作者身份透明时（研究2）、当将人工智能与专家危机应对者进行比较时（研究3）以及当向所有参与者披露作者身份时（研究4），这种结果模式依然存在。第三方认为人工智能更具反应能力——传达理解、认可和关怀——这部分解释了研究4中人工智能更高的同情心评分。这些发现表明，在需要同理心互动的情境中，人工智能具有强大的效用，有可能满足支持性沟通情境中对同理心日益增长的需求。
