Summary of questionnaire used in this experiment.

As AI technologies progress, social acceptance of AI agents, including intelligent virtual agents and robots, is becoming even more important for more applications of AI in human society. One way to improve the relationship between humans and anthropomorphic agents is to have humans empathize with the agents. By empathizing, humans act positively and kindly toward agents, which makes it easier for them to accept the agents. In this study, we focus on self-disclosure from agents to humans in order to increase empathy felt by humans toward anthropomorphic agents. We experimentally investigate the possibility that self-disclosure from an agent facilitates human empathy. We formulate hypotheses and experimentally analyze and discuss the conditions in which humans have more empathy toward agents. Experiments were conducted with a three-way mixed plan, and the factors were the agents’ appearance (human, robot), self-disclosure (high-relevance self-disclosure, low-relevance self-disclosure, no self-disclosure), and empathy before/after a video stimulus. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed using data from 918 participants. We found that the appearance factor did not have a main effect, and self-disclosure that was highly relevant to the scenario used facilitated more human empathy with a statistically significant difference. We also found that no self-disclosure suppressed empathy. These results support our hypotheses. This study reveals that self-disclosure represents an important characteristic of anthropomorphic agents which helps humans to accept them.

随着人工智能技术的迭代发展，人工智能智能体（AI Agent）——涵盖智能虚拟助手与实体机器人——的社会接受度，对于人工智能在人类社会中的落地应用而言正愈发关键。优化人类与拟人化智能体的互动关系，可通过引导人类对智能体产生共情来实现：当人类对智能体产生共情后，便会以积极友善的态度与之互动，进而更易接纳这类智能体。本研究聚焦于智能体向人类进行自我表露的行为，旨在提升人类对拟人化智能体的共情水平。我们通过实验探究了智能体自我表露对人类共情的促进作用，提出相关研究假设，并通过实验分析与讨论了人类对智能体产生更强共情的情境条件。本次实验采用三因素混合设计，自变量包含三项：智能体外观（人类外形、机器人外形）、自我表露类型（高相关性自我表露、低相关性自我表露、无自我表露），以及视频刺激前后的共情水平。我们对来自918名参与者的实验数据开展了方差分析（ANOVA），结果显示：智能体外观因素不存在主效应；与实验场景高度相关的自我表露可显著提升人类的共情程度，差异具有统计学显著性；而无自我表露则会抑制人类的共情水平。上述实验结果验证了本研究提出的全部假设。本研究证实，自我表露是拟人化智能体的一项核心特征，能够有效助力人类接纳这类智能体。