Empathy in Child-Robot Interaction: The Role of Narrative Framing, Age, Gender, and Baseline Empathy

The integration of social robots into educational contexts is steadily increasing, as these agents are used to foster engagement, support personalized learning, and create interactive experiences. In these contexts, empathy towards a social robot is a crucial mechanism to build trust, motivation, and social connections. Narrative framing has been shown to support the elicitation of empathy. However, little is known about how children’s empathy towards robots is affected by different narrative framing and how individual factors shape this relationship. Across two preregistered experiments, we investigated 7-15-year-olds’ empathy towards a social robot in focus groups (Experiment 1; n = 19) and the effect of narrative framing (sad vs. neutral), baseline empathy, age, and gender thereon in an experimental study (Experiment 2; n = 73). Experiment 1 showed that robot perception, personal experiences, and social norms affected children’s empathy towards a robot. Experiment 2 showed no significant effects of narrative framing, age, or baseline empathy on children’s empathy towards the robot. However, varying the narrative framing of the robot resulted in gender differences in elicited empathy, with girls showing higher empathy than boys in the neutral narrative condition. Our findings indicate that contextual and relational cues might exert a stronger influence on children’s empathic responses towards robots than developmental factors or dispositional traits specific to individual children. The two experiments that compose this study offervaluable insights into how empathy might be elicited through social robots. These insights hold promise for informing how best to design robotic agents that children can connect with in meaningful and effective ways in education and learning contexts.