Empathy Gap Research Articles

‘No, Alexa, no!’: designing child-safe AI and protecting children from the risks of the ‘empathy gap’ in large language models

ABSTRACT Rapid advancements in large language models makes child-safe design for their youngest users crucial. This article therefore offers child-centred AI design and policy recommendations to help make large language models (LLMs) utilised in conversational and generative AI systems safer for children. Conceptualising the risk of LLMs as ‘an empathy gap’, this research-based conceptual article focuses on the need to design LLMs that prevent or mitigate against the risks of responding inappropriately to children's personal disclosures or accidentally promoting harm. The article synthesises selected cases of human chatbot interaction and research findings across education, computer science and human-computer interaction studies. It concludes with practical recommendations for child-safe AI across eight dimensions of design and policy: content and communication; human intervention; transparency; accountability; justifiability; regulation; school-family engagement; and child-centred design methodologies. These eight dimensions are tailored to a variety of stakeholders, from policymakers and AI developers to educators and caregivers.

The Shakespearean Roadmap for the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals

Through an interdisciplinary lens of psychology, politics, environmentalism, economics and literary analysis, this paper explores intersections between the ethics embedded in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It(1599) and the food for thought on what is known since 2015 as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The paper scrutinizes Shakespeare’s criticism of unsustainable practices that thwart individual and collective prosperity as well as his advocacy of sustainability associated with the characters’ thoughts and behaviours. Analytical and comparative approaches are applied. The paper argues that the conducted analysis can raise the reader’s sustainable awareness and, consequently, accelerate his contribution to the implementation of the goals. The paper concludes that Shakespeare has managed to represent a roadmap for the implementation of the SDGs prior to the one proposed by the UN and that both roadmaps go beyond the fluctuating empathy gap between the wealthy and the impoverished to emphasize their partnership as pivotal for social welfare.Keywords: drama; awareness; sustainability; roadmap; implementation

Getting it right with discrete choice experiments: Are we hot or cold?

Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) are widely employed survey-based methods to assess preferences for healthcare services and products. While they offer an experimental way to represent health-related decisions, the stylized representation of scenarios in DCEs may overlook contextual factors that could influence decision-making. The aim of this paper was to evaluate the predictive validity of preferences elicited through a DCE in decisions likely influenced by a hot-cold empathy gap, and compare it to another commonly used method, a direct-elicitation question. We focused on preferences for pain-relief modalities, especially for an epidural during childbirth - a context where direct-elicitation questions have shown a preference for or intention to have a natural birth (representing the “cold” state), yet individuals often opt for an epidural during labor (representing the “hot” state). Leveraging a unique dataset collected from 248 individuals, we incorporated both the stated preferences collected through a survey administered upon hospital admission for childbirth and the actual pain-relief modality usage data documented in medical records. The DCE allowed for the evaluation of scenarios outside of those expected by respondents to simulate decision-making during childbirth. When we compared the predicted epidural use with the actual epidural use during labor, we observed a choice concordance of 71-60%, depending on the model specification. The concordance rate between the predicted and actual choices increased to 77-76% when accounting for the initial use of other ineffective modalities. In contrast, the direct-elicitation choices, relying solely on respondents’ baseline expectations, yielded a lower concordance rate of 58% with actual epidural use. These findings highlight the flexibility of the DCE method in simulating complex decision contexts, including those involving hot-cold empathy gaps. The DCE proves valuable in assessing nuanced preferences, providing a more accurate representation of the decision-making processes in healthcare scenarios.

Helping Practitioners Stop, Drop, and Roll: Suggestions to Help Improve Responses to Intense Clinical Events.

Community practitioners inconsistently implement evidence-based interventions. Implementation science emphasizes the importance of some practitioner characteristics, such as motivation, but factors such as practitioners' emotion regulation and cognitive processing receive less attention. Practitioners often operate in stressful environments that differ from those in which they received training. They may underestimate the impact of their emotional state on their ability to deliver evidence-based interventions. This "hot-cold state empathy gap" is not well studied in mental health care. In this Open Forum, the authors describe scenarios where this gap is affecting practitioners' ability to implement evidence-based practices. The authors provide suggestions to help practitioners plan for stressful situations.

Bridging the Empathy Gap in AI: Developing Culturally Attuned and Ethically Robust Educational Tools for Safeguarding Saudi Children’s Learning Environments

Bridging the Empathy Gap in AI: Developing Culturally Attuned and Ethically Robust Educational Tools for Safeguarding Saudi Children’s Learning Environments

Closing the empathy gap in health care: Connection First – before “intake”

ABSTRACT In this article, a communication framework of Connection First is presented to help close the empathy gap in mainstream health care, including palliative and end-of-life care. Expanding beyond biomedicine, Connection First involves rethinking and restructuring business-as-usual in health care. It shifts the typical transactional process during the initial intake session into one that is transformational. Connection First is a structural intervention and skillset comprised of the following elements: disrupting diagnosis, humanizing history, and repairing ruptures. These elements combine to help close the empathy gap in health care during the initial clinical encounter, before intake, and improve outcomes.

Hot-cold empathy gaps and the grounds of authenticity

Hot-cold empathy gaps and the grounds of authenticity

AI's empathy gap: The risks of conversational Artificial Intelligence for young children's well-being and key ethical considerations for early childhood education and care

Rapid technological advancements make it easier than ever for young children to ‘talk to’ artificial intelligence (AI). Conversational AI models spanning education and entertainment include those specifically designed for early childhood education and care, as well as those not designed for young children but easily accessible by them. It is therefore crucial to critically analyse the ethical implications for children's well-being when a conversation with AI is just a click away. This colloquium flags the ‘empathy gap’ that characterises AI systems that are designed to mimic empathy, explaining the risks of erratic or inadequate responses for child well-being. It discusses key social and technical concerns, tracing how conversational AI may be unable to adequately respond to young children's emotional needs and the limits of natural language processing due to AI's operation within predefined contexts determined by training data. While proficient at recognising patterns and data associations, conversational AI can falter when confronted with unconventional speech patterns, imaginative scenarios or the playful, non-literal language that is typical of children's communication. In addition, societal prejudices can infiltrate AI training data or influence the output of conversational AI, potentially undermining young children's rights to safe, non-discriminatory environments. This colloquium therefore underscores the ethical imperative of safeguarding children and responsible child-centred design. It offers a set of practical considerations for policies, practices and critical ethical reflection on conversational AI for the field of early childhood education and care, emphasising the need for transparent communication, continual evaluation and robust guard rails to prioritise children's well-being.

Enhancing empathy through virtual reality: Developing a universal design training application for students.

The lack of empathy towards disability is a significant societal issue that hampers inclusivity and understanding. Many struggle to comprehend the daily challenges and experiences faced by people with disabilities, leading to ignorance, prejudice, and exclusion. However, empathy plays a pivotal role in addressing this problem and serves as the foundation for developing and creating better products, services, and environments. This article explores the potential of developing virtual reality (VR) applications to enhance students' empathy towards individuals with disabilities. By increasing empathy levels, students are expected to gain significant qualifications in universal design (UD). The full application development process covers the most suitable head-mounted display (HMD) set. The implementation methodology using the Unity programming platform, the approach adopted for conducting classes using the developed VR application, and the deployment stage. Testing was successfully conducted on a student population, receiving positive user feedback. Through the integration of VR technology, the authors thoroughly describe how to address the empathy gap and equip students with essential skills for inclusive and accessible design. The findings presented in this study provide valuable guidance for educators and developers interested in harnessing VR's potential to foster empathy and advance universal design practices. With the presented methodology and proposed application, the authors demonstrate the effectiveness of VR applications in elevating students' empathy levels, consequently enhancing their qualifications in universal design. Med Pr. 2023;74(3):199-210.

BRIDGING DESIGNER-USER GAP WITH A VIRTUAL REALITY-BASED EMPATHIC DESIGN APPROACH: CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION DETAILS

AbstractWithout shared experiences, empathy gaps between designers and users are difficult to bridge. Advancing Virtual Reality (VR) has shed new light on this regard by enabling designers to simulate and experience their users' living scenarios in a virtual environment (VE). However, implementing VR-based empathetic design approach requires dealing with critical design questions, such as: (1) whether VR operators can develop empathy for unfamiliar user groups solely based on objective experience and (2) whether VR operators can utilize task-irrelevant contextual information in the VEs. To explore these issues, we designed an experiment based on two VEs with varying levels of detail that simulated the scenes viewed by people with red-green color vision deficiency (CVD). Participants were randomly assigned to either detail-rich or detail-simple VEs to complete neutral item-searching tasks. Results indicate that objective and neutral experience alone cannot elicit empathy towards users, and VR operating designers will utilize task-irrelevant contextual information.

‘Male circumcision’ and ‘female genital mutilation’: why parents choose the procedures and the case for gender bias in medical nomenclature

ABSTRACT Cutting of boys’ and girls’ genitalia is a debated human rights topic. Here, the first aim was to summarise why parents choose to have these procedures performed on their children. Results from 22 survey studies on ‘male circumcision’ and 27 studies on ‘female genital mutilation’ revealed that non-medical reasons, such as tradition, are prominent in the decisions for both procedures. The second aim was to describe researchers’ use of medical words (i.e. ‘circumcision’) and non-medical words (i.e. ‘cutting’, ‘mutilation’) when referring to these procedures. Relevant phrases were searched in titles and abstracts of articles indexed in PubMed. Total article count was similar for male (1721 articles) and female (1906 articles) procedures. However, for female procedures, ‘genital mutilation’ was used most frequently (61.7% of articles), whereas for males, ‘circumcision’ was used almost exclusively (99.4%). Because both procedures involve significant alteration of genitalia, and social/culture reasons are prominent in parents’ decisions for both, the results suggest a gender bias in medical ethics applied to bodily integrity, which manifests itself in nomenclature that expresses negative value judgement toward the female procedure (‘mutilation’) but not the male procedure (‘circumcision’). The results add to emerging evidence of a ‘male empathy gap’ in public health.

Pragmatic competence, autistic language use and the basic properties of human language

AbstractThe unique linguistic profile of autistic people urges linguists to address the divergences in human language, its acquisition and use among major linguistic perspectives. Fitting with the dual roles of language (thought and communication), this paper adopts an internal pragmatic competence (IPC) and a (similar) pragmatic competence for external communication (PCEC) to elucidate how autistic linguistic profile discloses the divergences between nativism and constructionism on language use and acquisition (ultimately language proper). IPC justifies why autistic people resort not to mind‐reading but to self‐sufficient mental interactions among organism‐internal submodules or nearly intact grammatical subsystems when abstractly processing linguistic and communicative needs, contra constructionists' assumption of sole intersubjective language use. PCEC, required for facilitating the authentic intersubjective language use, explains how the dysfunction of modular interactions and their interactions with outside contexts leads to autistics' sociopragmatic impairment and the double empathy gap. In this way, the divergences, along with the possible reconciliation between the two perspectives, can be expounded.

Empathy Gap in Social Media Comments for Sexual Harassment Victim

Indonesian Twitter users who filed a complaint about sexual harassment were studied to see if there was an empathy gap among their tweet responses. The author uses a content analysis method and observes a sample of empathy gap experiences to notice and study empathy gap behaviour in Twitter toward sexual harassment victims. In the research that has been done, the comments tweet as amount 3733 tweets and chosen 60 of them randomly to know-how is the empathy gap with sexual harassment cases. It is concluded that bullies have aggressive and intimidating characteristics. On message production by the bully, actors are supposed to produce messages in expressive, conventional, and rhetorical ways, including negative empathy characteristics. So on the other hand, the research that has been done concludes that people who act as victims have passive and defensive elements. On message reception by the communicant (victim), the victim placed the position of receiving the message in a dominant, negotiating, and oppositional position.

Closing the empathy gap: A narrative review of the measurement and reduction of parochial empathy

AbstractRecent research indicates that empathy‐enhancing interventions are limited in their ability to produce meaningful and lasting reductions in bias and hostility toward outgroup members. Parochial empathy—defined as preferentially higher empathy felt for ingroup over outgroup members—has been shown to be a promoter of intergroup conflict and antipathy. Our review will discuss the shortfalls of enhancing empathy for its own sake in intergroup contexts. We leverage the longstanding theory and science of multidimensional perspectives and operationalizations of general empathy, which include cognitive, affective and motivational responses to others' suffering. Thereafter we will discuss the current state of the science on measuring parochial empathy. We close by suggesting a multidimensional perspective of parochial empathy can inform interventions to promote intergroup prosociality, particularly interventions that directly and/or indirectly motivate other‐oriented empathy and concern.

Team Leaders as Cognition Orchestrators - Improving Creativity by Reducing Cognitive Biases

This paper articulates an idea of team leaders as cognition orchestrators – those who orchestrate and facilitate multicultural teams’ interactions during the creative process – as a novel approach to understanding how multicultural team leaders leverage teams’ diverse cognition-based resources to enhance creative performance. I theorize that team leaders can create and maintain a team climate – a social fabric facilitating effective knowledge generation – to foster the creative performance of culturally diverse teams through mitigating members’ cognitive biases. I identify seven types of cognitive biases relevant to team creativity, namely projection bias, egocentric empathy gap, focusing illusion, confirmation bias, endowment effect, and authority bias (or the rule “respect and obey others”). This paper further puts forward a set of propositions to address these biases towards improving team creative performance. Through this paper, while responding to the call for more research on the positive side of cultural diversity, I shed more light on leaders as agents of changes in team processes through mitigating cognition biases. Crossing the management discipline, this work is also the first attempt to introduce a design-driven approach (using a non-human actor for interaction and communication) towards resolving the intercultural encounters in multicultural teams.

Does Mental Simulation Decrease the Empathy Gap in Help‐Seeking?

AbstractPeople hesitate to seek help when they perceive the cost of helping as high. In general, help‐seekers overestimate the cost of helping because of errors in perspective‐taking. We examined whether three processes of mental simulation (recalling an experience of providing help, of rejecting a request for help, and of sensing the empathy gap) would decrease the cost of helping perceived by help‐seekers. Participants underwent one of the simulations or no simulation (control condition), read two scenarios that described helping and help‐seeking, and rated the perceived cost of helping in the scenarios. Contrary to the prediction, simulations did not decrease the cost of helping perceived by help‐seekers. Recalling an experience of rejecting requests also increased the perceived cost of helping in unemployment scenarios. The post hoc analysis for controlling the depressive mood in depression scenarios showed that the cost of helping from the helper's perspective decreased, whereas that from the help‐seekers remained the same under the empathy‐gap simulation condition. These results suggest that realizing the asymmetry between helpers and help‐seekers may be counterproductive in help‐seeking and widen the empathy gap.

Gaming (with) Affect and Trauma: An Introduction

Gaming (with) Affect and Trauma: An Introduction

Drone fiction, empathy gap and the reader: Mohsin Hamid’s short story Terminator: Attack of the Drone (2011)

ABSTRACT This article contends that the analysis of drone fiction from the perspective of Reader-Response Theory yields valuable insights into the configuration of this newly emerging genre and constitutes a neo Reader-Response theoretical paradigm. Drawing on insights from Reader-Response Theory and drone fiction critical approaches, this study delineates how Mohsin Hamid’s short story Terminator: Attack of the Drone (2011) prompts readers to affectively engage in the process of reconstructing this text and empathise with the drone victims. By conducting a textual analysis of the narrative strategies and literary devices, this article demonstrates that how this narrative simultaneously exploits the notion of ‘empathy gap’, inherent in the drone fiction theory, and the propositions of Reader-Response theory related to ‘gaps’ to unpack the ongoing dehumanisation of certain races and communities in contemporary milieu. I contend that this short text evokes empathy of readers and encourages them to reconfigure the humanity of the drone victims. Hence, Hamid’s drone fiction acts as an aesthetic conduit which invokes readers to become active participants in the process of deciphering the social, racial, political and humanitarian repercussions of unprecedented drone warfare and to recognise the socio-political epistemology of ‘being human’ under drone warfare.

Bridging the empathy gap: or not? Reactions to ingroup and outgroup facial expressions

AbstractPrior research suggests that group membership impacts behavioral and self-reported responses to others’ facial expressions of emotion. In this paper, we examine how the mere labelling of a face as an ingroup or outgroup member affects facial mimicry (Study 1) and judgments of genuineness (Study 2). In addition, we test whether the effects of group membership on facial mimicry and perceived genuineness are moderated by the presence of tears (Study 1) and the motivation to cooperate (Study 2). Results from both studies revealed group-specific biases in facial mimicry and judgments of genuineness. However, introducing cooperative goals abolished differences in judgments of genuineness of facial expressions displayed by ingroup and outgroup members. Together, the findings provide insights into how intergroup biases in emotion perception operate and how they can be reduced by introducing cooperative goals.

Dreading the pain of others? Altruistic responses to others' pain underestimate dread.

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed 'dread', is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it. However, despite many accounts of altruistic responses to pain in others, no previous studies have tested whether people take delay into account when attempting to ameliorate others' pain. We examined the impact of delay in 2 experiments where participants (total N=130) specified the intensity and delay of pain either for themselves or another person. Participants were willing to increase the experimental pain of another participant to avoid delaying it, indicative of dread, though did so to a lesser extent than was the case for their own pain. We observed a similar attenuation in dread when participants chose the timing of a hypothetical painful medical treatment for a close friend or relative, but no such attenuation when participants chose for a more distant acquaintance. A model in which altruism is biased to privilege pain intensity over the dread of pain parsimoniously accounts for these findings. We refer to this underestimation of others' dread as a 'Dread Empathy Gap'.