Book contents
- Empathy and Artificial Intelligence
- Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
- Empathy and Artificial Intelligence
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- AI and Empathy at a Crossroads
- Part IUnderstanding Empathy
- Part IIPerceiving AI Empathy
- Part IIIBeyond Text: Embodiment and Robots
- Chapter 13Examining the Capacity of Human Beings to Experience Empathy toward AI
- Chapter 14Trust and Social Affiliation May Influence Evacuee Decisions during Robot-Guided Evacuation
- Chapter 15Does Embodiment Influence Empathy toward Artificial Agents?
- Chapter 16Your Robot Will Feel You Now
- Chapter 17Children’s Judgments of and Interactions with Empathetic AI
- Chapter 18Anticipating Children’s Beliefs about Artificial Empathy
- Chapter 19From Social Media to Empathic Artificial Intelligence
- Part IVMoral Implications
- Index
- Studies In Emotion and Social Interaction
- References
Chapter 14 - Trust and Social Affiliation May Influence Evacuee Decisions during Robot-Guided Evacuation
from Part III - Beyond Text: Embodiment and Robots
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2026
Book contents
- Empathy and Artificial Intelligence
- Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
- Empathy and Artificial Intelligence
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- AI and Empathy at a Crossroads
- Part IUnderstanding Empathy
- Part IIPerceiving AI Empathy
- Part IIIBeyond Text: Embodiment and Robots
- Chapter 13Examining the Capacity of Human Beings to Experience Empathy toward AI
- Chapter 14Trust and Social Affiliation May Influence Evacuee Decisions during Robot-Guided Evacuation
- Chapter 15Does Embodiment Influence Empathy toward Artificial Agents?
- Chapter 16Your Robot Will Feel You Now
- Chapter 17Children’s Judgments of and Interactions with Empathetic AI
- Chapter 18Anticipating Children’s Beliefs about Artificial Empathy
- Chapter 19From Social Media to Empathic Artificial Intelligence
- Part IVMoral Implications
- Index
- Studies In Emotion and Social Interaction
- References
Summary
Our chapter will discuss the role that trust and social affiliation play in human evacuee decisions to continue following a robot that produces questionable guidance directions during an emergency. Our research has demonstrated that people will follow a robot’s guidance directions during an emergency even if the robot has demonstrated its fallibility or the robot’s directions are illogical. We have recently completed extensive experimentation using a combination of virtual reality and physical experiments. Our results suggest that social affiliation may be a driver of decisions to follow the robot in spite of clear evidence that doing so will put the person in harm’s way. The findings suggest that increasing a robot’s ability to interact with evacuees may foster empathy with the robot, increasing risk for the evacuee in contexts where the robot is fallible or where the best decision is to abandon the robot.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Empathy and Artificial IntelligenceChallenges, Advances and Ethical Considerations, pp. 140 - 147Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
References
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Mobbs, D., Petrovic, P., Marchant, J. L., Hassabis, D., Weiskopf, N., Seymour, B., Dolan, R. J., & Frith, C. D. (2007). When fear is near: Threat imminence elicits prefrontal–periaqueductal gray shifts in humans. Science, 317, 1079–1083. doi:10.1126/science.1144298CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nayyar, M., Paik, G., Yuan, Z., Zheng, T., Zhu, M., Lin, H., & Wagner, A. R. (2023). Learning evacuee models from robot-guided emergency evacuation experiments. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.17824. doi:https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.17824CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinette, P., Li, W., Allen, R., Howard, A. M., & Wagner, A. R. (2016). Overtrust of robots in emergency evacuation scenarios. In 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 101–108). IEEE.Google Scholar
Wagner, A. R., Holbrook, C., Holman, D., Sheeran, B., Surendran, V., Armagost, J., Spazak, S., & Yin, Y. (2022). Using virtual reality to simulate human-robot emergency evacuation scenarios. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08414Google Scholar
Wagner, A. R., Robinette, P., & Howard, A. (2018). Modeling the human–robot trust phenomenon: A conceptual framework based on risk. ACM Transaction Interaction Intelligent Systems, 8(4), 24. doi:10.1145/3152890.Google Scholar
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