Feeling with a robot—the role of anthropomorphism by design and the tendency to anthropomorphize in human-robot interaction

The implementation of anthropomorphic features in regard to appearance and framing is widely supposed to increase empathy towards robots. However, recent research used mainly tasks that are rather atypical for daily human-robot interactions like sacrificing or destroying robots. The scope of the current study was to investigate the influence of anthropomorphism by design on empathy and empathic behavior in a more realistic, collaborative scenario. In this online experiment, participants collaborated either with an anthropomorphic or a technical looking robot and received either an anthropomorphic or a technical description of the respective robot. After the task completion, we investigated situational empathy by displaying a choice-scenario in which participants needed to decide whether they wanted to act empathically towards the robot (sign a petition or a guestbook for the robot) or non empathically (leave the experiment). Subsequently, the perception of and empathy towards the robot was assessed. The results revealed no significant influence of anthropomorphism on empathy and participants’ empathic behavior. However, an exploratory follow-up analysis indicates that the individual tendency to anthropomorphize might be crucial for empathy. This result strongly supports the importance to consider individual difference in human-robot interaction. Based on the exploratory analysis, we propose six items to be further investigated as empathy questionnaire in HRI.