Empathy in Explanation
This work addresses the role of emotion in social interactions for explanation, which is incremental as it builds on prior cooperative perspectives.
The paper tackles the problem of how emotion influences explanation-giving by modeling explainers who consider the emotional impact on listeners, and it shows that this model predicts human intuitions better than emotion-agnostic alternatives.
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.