💓 People who practice empathy with AI get better at showing compassion

• A study with 968 participants shows that personalized feedback from an AI coach makes people significantly better at communicating with empathy.
• People who feel empathy often fail to express it – most believed they were good listeners, but independent assessment showed that few actually were.
• Independent raters preferred the conversations improved by the AI coach, confirming that the training makes a real difference.

Feeling empathy is not enough

Empathy is central to human relationships. But actually expressing compassion in a way that makes others feel heard is difficult. Research shows that large language models in blinded tests are often judged as more empathic than the average person. At the same time, recipients feel less heard if they learn the response came from an AI.

This raises a question: can people learn from AI to become better at expressing empathy?

A research team from Northwestern University and Stanford University built the platform Lend an Ear to investigate exactly that. The study was published in March 2026 and included 968 participants who conducted 2,904 text-based conversations with AI role-playing partners. In total, 33,938 messages were generated.

How the experiment worked

Participants were randomly assigned to four groups: a control group with no feedback, a group that received short instructional videos, a group that received personalized feedback from an AI coach, and a group that received both video and AI coaching.

In each conversation, an AI partner played the role of a person in crisis. The scenarios included having lost a job, being passed over for a promotion, feeling undervalued at work, having a family member diagnosed with cancer, or losing a parent. Participants practiced providing support in three separate conversations with at least four turns and four minutes per conversation.

After each conversation, those in the AI coach group received individual feedback on six dimensions: encouraging elaboration, validating emotions, demonstrating understanding, giving unsolicited advice, being self-oriented, and dismissing emotions.

91 percent of participants rated the scenarios as quite or very realistic.

The AI coach produced clear results

Personalized feedback from the AI coach led to improvements across five of six pre-registered dimensions of empathic communication. Participants who received AI coaching improved all three positive behaviors compared to the control group. Encouraging elaboration increased by 0.648 standard deviations, validating emotions by 0.475, and demonstrating understanding by 0.459.

At the same time, negative behaviors decreased. Unsolicited advice-giving decreased by 0.679 standard deviations, dismissing emotions by 0.451, and self-oriented responses by 0.213.

In total, the AI coach produced an increase of 0.98 standard deviations in the overall empathy measure, corresponding to an improvement of 2.9 points.

In the control group, only 2.9 percent of participants showed reliable improvement. In the AI coaching group, the figure was 21.6 percent, and in the combined group 26.3 percent.

People overestimate their own empathy

The study revealed a clear gap between perceived and expressed empathy. The correlation between self-reported empathic ability and actual performance was essentially zero, with R² values between 0.000 and 0.003.

74 percent of participants believed they encouraged their conversation partner to share more "quite a bit" or "very much." According to the independent AI assessors, only 18 percent actually did so. For demonstrating understanding, the figures were 87 percent according to the participants themselves versus 9 percent according to the assessors.

The researchers call this a "silent empathy effect": people feel empathy but systematically fail to express it. The feeling of compassion does not automatically translate into words that make others feel heard.

Independent raters confirmed the improvement

In a second experiment, 150 independent raters were recruited via the platform Prolific. They were asked to compare pairs of conversations from the study and choose the more empathic one. The raters consistently preferred the conversations that the AI system had scored higher.

At a score difference of five points, raters chose the higher-ranked conversation 73 percent of the time. At a ten-point difference, the figure rose to 93 percent. Rankings based on human preferences correlated strongly with the AI assessments, with a Spearman correlation value of 0.85.

A mapping of empathic language

Using so-called k-sparse autoencoders, the researchers analyzed 29,520 sentences and identified 128 categories of empathic expressions. These were sorted into a four-part structure: affective empathy (25 percent of messages), cognitive empathy (27 percent), motivational empathy (26 percent), and misattuned behaviors (22 percent).

After AI coaching, the share of messages that validated emotions increased by 3.9 percentage points in personal scenarios and 2.9 percentage points in workplace scenarios. Advice-giving decreased by 3.8 and 5.1 percentage points respectively. Conversation length and number of turns did not change, suggesting that it was the quality, not the quantity, that improved.

A trainable skill

The researchers describe empathic communication as an idiom – a pattern of conversational moves that can be learned. Traditional training programs require experts and substantial resources. AI-based coaching can offer the same type of personalized feedback to anyone with internet access.

The study was conducted with a demographically representative sample of the US population. The participants' average age was 45.6 years, 51.8 percent were women, and the experiment took an average of 20 minutes to complete.

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