Researchers at the Department of Information Science and Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology in collaboration with researchers at the Department of Psychology at Kyoto University are the first to prove that humans feel some level of empathy for robots. The empathy felt for robots is not exactly the same as empathy felt for humans. The neurological signals of empathy were the same for human-like robots as they were for people.
The participants in the study were connected to an electroencephalograph to measure the brain responses that are known to be associated with empathy. The participants observed a human hand being cut by a knife and a robot’s hand being cut with a knife. The empathetic response was similar for both humans and robots but the time and strength of the empathetic response was initially slower when the participants saw a robot being harmed.
The major difference in the empathy people had for humans in distress and robots in distress was in the initial time period that the participants began to feel empathy. There was no difference in the intensity of the feelings of empathy for a human or a robot once empathy had been established. The researchers see the difference as a matter of perspective. People cannot imagine how a robot feels as readily as they can how a human feels so the time to initiate feelings of empathy for robots being harmed takes longer.
The objective of the study is to develop more human-friendly robots. People have always felt an affinity with robots that were depicted in science fiction movies. The advances in artificial intelligence and the sophistication of robot technology may eventually lead to a robot that feels empathy for humans or that can at least portray the characteristics of empathy.
