Can Unconscious Verbal Mimicry Measure Empathy in Design?

Abstract Developing empathy towards a user is a vital part of user-centered design. Several approaches developed in psychology, sociology, and neuroscience have been adopted in measuring empathy in design. However, these approaches have limitations, such as subjective bias, time consumption, the need for specialized equipment, and expensive laboratories. To address these shortcomings, there is a need for a quick, easy-to-implement, and automatic measure of empathy in design. We explore empathy measurement using transcripts from a user interview. More specifically, we explored whether language style matching (LSM), a measure of unconscious verbal mimicry, can be an indicator of empathic mental processes. We further investigated its relationship with the designer’s empathic understanding of the user and the emotion similarity between the designer and the user. The results show that verbal mimicry exists between the designer and the user. However, this mimicry, as detected with LSM was not correlated with empathic understanding accuracy. Instead, we found that LSM has a significant correlation with the similarity between the designer’s and the user’s expressed emotions during the interview. Verbal mimicry using LSM shows the potential to measure the designer’s empathic understanding of the user, which is both cognitive and affective. Further research should explore other measures of empathic understanding.