Effects of Self-Experience and Situational Awareness on Empathic Help to Virtual Agents

What factors induce human empathy for virtual agents? To explore this question, we examined the relationship between humans and agents through the inverted cyberball game, wherein a participant is able to help an ostracized agent. In particular, this study attempted to distinguish factors of self-experience from situational awareness as the basis for empathy. In one scenario, participants completed a pre-task in which they had the same experience as the ostracized agent, while in another scenario, participants just observed ostracizing relations between three agents. As a result, self-experience with the pre-task did not influence the occurrence of helping behavior for the ostracized agent in the main task. Rather, the factor inducing the helping behavior was whether the participants noticed the ostracizing relations. This attentiveness was also associated with an empathetic trait, measured as the empathy quotient (EQ). From these results, we concluded that empathy is an ability to adopt others’ perspectives, even without direct or first-hand experience with others’ pain.