ArticleCommunications psychology2025
Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans.
Article in Communications psychology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Impact of Large Language Model-Based AI Tools on Physician-Patient Communication: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Pooled it
- AI feedback and workplace social support in enhancing occupational self-efficacy: a randomized controlled trial in Japan.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- The benefits and future potential of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) on mental health: a Delphi study.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2026Article
- Perspectives of People with Serious Mental Illness on Artificial Intelligence-Based Companions: "If no one told you I love you today, you have someone that cares for you."Community mental health journal · 2026Article
- Tool or Companion? Reframing Conversational AI to Prevent Psychological Harm.JMIR mental health · 2026Review
- Compassion and Self-Compassion in Relation to Nursing Students' Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence.Nursing open · 2026Article
- How AI companions could deepen social inequality.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Large Language Models as a New Tool for Therapists in Internet-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Blinded Clinician Rating Pilot Experiment.JMIR mental health · 2026Article
- How Individual Differences in Empathy Predict Moments of Empathy in Everyday Life.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2026Article
- The cognitive biases that may exacerbate inflationary and deflationary positions about large language models.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2026Review
- The new narrative medicine: ethical implications of artificial intelligence on healthcare narratives.Monash bioethics review · 2026Article
- Comparison of artificial intelligence-based chatbots and expert periodontists in responding to patient questions: a multi-dimensional analysis.BMC oral health · 2026Article
- Patient Perspectives on AI-Drafted Electronic Portal Messages.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- Article
- Linguistic Comparison of AI- and Human-Written Responses to Online Mental Health Queries.NPJ artificial intelligence · 2026Article
- Can artificial intelligence help with the development of generic clinical skills when breaking bad news? A quantitative evaluation.Clinical medicine (London, England) · 2026Article
- Feasibility and acceptability of the MentiParent AI chatbot for training parental reflective functioning.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Unlikely Storyteller: Leveraging Narrative-Based Communication in LLM-Generated Medical Advice.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Validation of the safety, empathy and utility of a large language model conversation agent for parents of autistic and neurodivergent children.Scientific reports · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Empathy connects us but strains under demanding settings. This study explored how third parties evaluated AI-generated empathetic responses versus human responses in terms of compassion, responsiveness, and overall preference across four preregistered experiments. Participants (N = 556) read empathy prompts describing valenced personal experiences and compared the AI responses to select non-expert or expert humans. Results revealed that AI responses were preferred and rated as more compassionate compared to select human responders (Study 1). This pattern of results remained when author identity was made transparent (Study 2), when AI was compared to expert crisis responders (Study 3), and when author identity was disclosed to all participants (Study 4). Third parties perceived AI as being more responsive-conveying understanding, validation, and care-which partially explained AI's higher compassion ratings in Study 4. These findings suggest that AI has robust utility in contexts requiring empathetic interaction, with the potential to address the increasing need for empathy in supportive communication contexts.
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.