The Role of Empathic Traits in the Interaction With Virtual Humans

Nowadays, individuals experience social interactions largely via virtual reality, such as, virtual chat rooms, virtual social and gaming communities (e.g., Second life, World of Warcraft or the more recent Metaverse) and so forth. The venue of new live digital worlds poses new challenges for experts in the field of virtual reality and cognitive and social sciences: how users interact with virtual humans, and whether individual characteristics (e.g., empathy traits) could influence the way people treat virtual humans. To address this issue, here, participants were asked to complete the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (assessing empathic traits) and determine the interpersonal distance (i.e., comfort distance) from virtual humans (who exhibited happy, neutral, or angry facial expressions) while being approached (passive approach) or approached them (active approach). Results showed that overall, the distance was larger with angry virtual agents than the others. More importantly, the higher empathic concern the shorter the distance with happy and neutral virtual humans in the active approach condition; the higher the personal distress the larger the distance with happy and neutral virtual humans in the passive approach condition. These results suggest that individual empathic traits may modulate virtual social interactions affecting the way people treat and respond to virtual humans.