Desired partners in crises perform worse in extensive scientific test series
Although people prefer compassion that comes from other humans, they find the empathy communicated by artificial intelligence (AI) to be more effective. This was discovered by researchers at Pennsylvania State University (PennState) and the University of Toronto. They conducted a study to gain a better understanding of how people perceive empathetic AI responses and whether they prefer to receive support from humans or AI agents.
Humans versus ChatGPT
According to the results of the study published in Communications Psychology, people prefer to receive empathy from other humans when given the choice, but AI responses are rated as more supportive. PennState psychologist Joshua D. Wenger bases his assessment on four studies. The researchers presented participants with various challenging real-life scenarios and asked them to imagine themselves in each situation.
For each situation, the researchers asked participants whether they would prefer to receive support from a human or an AI agent. Based on their answers, they then presented them with empathetic responses that were either written by humans or generated by ChatGPT. ‘We presented participants with empathetic responses created by their chosen source and then asked them to rate how those responses made them feel,’ Wenger said.
Comfort in imaginary crises
When analysing the participants’ ratings (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00387-3), the researchers found that the subjects consistently preferred to receive empathy from a fellow human being rather than from an AI agent. This was true for all the experiments conducted – regardless of whether the participants were presented with imaginary scenarios or asked to describe their own experiences.
However, the participants did not know whether the comforting words had been written by humans or generated by AI. It turned out that even those who had wanted sympathy from humans found more comfort in the AI-generated words than in those written by their desired human partner. This was even true for texts written by people whose job it is to offer comfort.
