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arXiv · 2507.21081

Empathy in Explanation

Katherine M. Collins·Kartik Chandra·Adrian Weller·Jonathan Ragan-Kelley·Joshua B. Tenenbaum
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Abstract

Why do we give the explanations we do? Recent work has suggested that we should think of explanation as a kind of cooperative social interaction, between a why-question-asker and an explainer. Here, we apply this perspective to consider the role that emotion plays in this social interaction. We develop a computational framework for modeling explainers who consider the emotional impact an explanation might have on a listener. We test our framework by using it to model human intuitions about how a doctor might explain to a patient why they have a disease, taking into account the patient's propensity for regret. Our model predicts human intuitions well, better than emotion-agnostic ablations, suggesting that people do indeed reason about emotion when giving explanations.

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Katherine M. Collins, Kartik Chandra, Adrian Weller, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Joshua B. Tenenbaum. 2025-06-16. Empathy in Explanation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21081

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