Humans have empathy for robots, although apparently not as much as we do for other humans.
That's the finding of new research using brain scans—functional magnetic-resonance imaging, to be exact—to assess people's responses to affection or violence toward robots. Researchers in Germany recruited 14 volunteers and found that humans subjected to such scans while watching videos of affectionate behavior toward robots and toward people showed similar neural activation patterns in the brain's limbic structures, suggesting similar emotional reactions in both instances.
Brain scans of people shown videos of abusive behavior indicated more empathy when the victim was a human being than when the sufferer was a robot.
"Investigation on Empathy Towards Humans and Robots Using Psychophysiological Measures and fMRI," Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten and Nicole Krämer; to be presented at the International Communication Association Conference, London (forthcoming in June)
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