Cultural effects on judgments of empathic technology

Determine whether the relational orientation and culturally specific patterns of empathy observed in Chinese interpersonal contexts also shape how Chinese-speaking users interpret empathic and non-empathic behavior from artificial systems.

Background

The paper reviews evidence that Chinese empathy is shaped by relational orientation, collectivist values, indirect communication, contextual sensitivity, and culturally specific theories of emotional regulation. However, the cited literature primarily concerns empathy between people rather than empathy attributed to technological systems.

The authors identify an unresolved issue concerning whether these interpersonal cultural patterns carry over to judgments of artificial agents. Establishing this would clarify whether culturally grounded expectations influence the interpretation of empathic system behavior and would inform the design and cross-cultural evaluation of empathic technologies.

References

How these patterns translate to judgments of artificial systems is not yet established, as the literature describes empathy between people rather than empathy attributed to technology, leaving open whether the same relational orientation shapes how users read empathic and non-empathic system behavior.

— A Systematic and Validated Translation of the Perceived Empathy of Technology Scale to Chinese  (2610.21541 - Schmidmaier et al., 15 Oct 2026) in Section 2.2, subsection “Empathy in Chinese Culture”