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 thesecontexts, empathy towards a social robot is recognized as 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 such as age, gender, and baseline empathy shape this relationship. Across two preregistered experiments, we investigated 7-15-year-olds’ empathy towards a social robot in focus groups (n = 19) and an experimental study (n = 73). Our focus group findings show that robot perception, personal experiences, and social norms affected children’s empathy and willingness to help the robot. In experiment 2, we found no significant effects of narrative framing, age, or baseline empathy on children’s empathy towards the robot. However, girls showed significantly higher empathy than boys in the neutral narrative condition, a difference not present in the sad 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 that are specific to individual children. The two experiments that compose this study offer valuable 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.