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How anthropomorphism affects empathy toward robots
Abstract
A long-standing question within the robotics community is about the degree of human-likeness robots ought to have when interacting with humans. We explore an unexamined aspect of this problem: how people empathize with robots along the anthropomorphic spectrum. We conducted an experiment that measured how people empathized with robots shown to be experiencing mistreatment by humans. Our results indicate that people empathize more strongly with more human-looking robots and less with mechanicallooking robots.
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Citations
Cited by
Anthropomorphism and human likeness in the design of robots and human-robot interaction
Fink, J. (2012) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-34103-8_20 · Cited by 455
Putting the art in artificial: Aesthetic responses to computer-generated art.
Chamberlain, R., Mullin, C., Scheerlinck, B., & Wagemans, J. (2018) · Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts · doi:10.1037/aca0000136 · Cited by 225
Effects of Anthropomorphism and Accountability on Trust in Human Robot Interaction
Natarajan, M., & Gombolay, M. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction · doi:10.1145/3319502.3374839 · Cited by 248
Kirk, H. R., Vidgen, B., Röttger, P., & Hale, S. A. (2024) · Nature Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1038/s42256-024-00820-y · Cited by 122
Corti, K., & Gillespie, A. (2016) · Computers in Human Behavior · doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.12.039 · Cited by 118
Metadata
- Authors
- Riek, L. D., Rabinowitch, T.-C., Chakrabarti, B., & Robinson, P.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2009-03-09
- Pages
- 245-246
- OpenAlex
- W2152536828
- Cited by
- 307
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 5.00
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How anthropomorphism affects empathy toward robots. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/1514095.1514158
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- Riek, L. D., Rabinowitch, T.-C., Chakrabarti, B., & Robinson, P. (2009). How anthropomorphism affects empathy toward robots. Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/1514095.1514158
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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
