Empathic concern and the effect of stories in human-robot interaction

People have been shown to project lifelike attributes onto robots and to display behavior indicative of empathy in human-robot interaction. Our work explores the role of empathy by examining how humans respond to a simple robotic object when asked to strike it. We measure the effects of lifelike movement and stories on people's hesitation to strike the robot, and we evaluate the relationship between hesitation and people's trait empathy. Our results show that people with a certain type of high trait empathy (empathic concern) hesitate to strike the robots. We also find that high empathic concern and hesitation are more strongly related for robots with stories. This suggests that high trait empathy increases people's hesitation to strike a robot, and that stories may positively influence their empathic responses.