Degrees of Empathy: Humans’ Empathy Toward Humans, Animals, Robots and Objects

The aim of this paper is to present an experiment in which we compare the degree of empathy that a convenience sample of students expressed with humans, animals, robots and objects. The present study broadens the spectrum of the elements eliciting empathy that previous research has so far explored separately. Our research questions are: does the continuum represented by this set of elements elicit empathy? Is it possible to observe a linear decrease of empathy according to different features of the selected elements? More broadly, does empathy, as a construct, resist in front of the diversification of the element eliciting it? Results show that participants expressed empathy differently when exposed to three clusters of social actors being mistreated: they felt more sad, sorry, aroused and out of control for animals than for humans, but showed little to no empathy for objects. Interestingly, robots that looked more human-like evoked emotions similar to those evoked by humans, while robots that looked more animal-like evoked emotions half-way between those evoked by humans and objects. Implications are discussed.