Empathic embarrassment towards non-human agents in virtual environments

Humans feel empathic embarrassment by witnessing others go through embarrassing situations. We examined whether we feel such empathic embarrassment even with robot avatars. Participants observed a human avatar and a robot avatar face a series of embarrassing and non-embarrassing scenarios. We collected data for their empathic embarrassment and the cognitive empathy on a 7-point Likert scale. Both empathic embarrassment and cognitive empathy were significantly higher in the embarrassed condition compared to the non-embarrassed condition with both avatars, and the cognitive empathy was significantly higher with the human avatar. There was a tendency of participants showing a higher level of skin conductance while watching the human avatar go through embarrassing situations compared to the robot avatar. A following experiment showed that the average plausibility of the embarrassed condition was significantly higher with the human avatar compared to the robot avatar. However, plausibility scores for emotion were not significantly different among the conditions. These results suggest that humans can feel empathic embarrassment as well as cognitive empathy for robot avatars while cognitive empathy for robot avatars is comparatively lower, and that part of the empathic difference between human and robot avatars might be due to the difference of their plausibility.