Degrees of Empathy. Humans’ Empathy Toward Humans, Animals, Robots and Objects
The aim of this paper is to present an experiment in which we compare the degree of empathy that a convenience sample of students expressed with humans, animals, robots and objects. The present study broadens the spectrum of the elements eliciting empathy that previous research has so far explored separately. Our research questions are: does the continuum represented by this set of elements elicit empathy? Is it possible to observe a linear decrease of empathy according to different features of the selected elements?