Agents promote human empathy by task difficulty

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 the task between agents and humans. Therefore, we experimentally investigated hypotheses possibility that task difficulty and task content would facilitate human empathy. The experiment was a three-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with eight conditions: task difficulty, task content, and empathy values before and after the task (2 x 2 x 2). The results showed that there was no main effect of the task content factor, and the main effect of the task difficulty factor tended to be significant. In addition, there was an interaction between task difficulty and empathy values before and after the task. As a result, when the task difficulty was high, empathy was facilitated more than when the task difficulty was low.