Practical Empathy: The Duality of Social and Transactional Roles of Conversational Agents in Giving Health Advice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conversational agents (CAs) are getting increasingly popular for dispensing health advice to both patients and general users. However, the literature on CAs presents a tension between the users’ conceptualization of agent-based conversations in transactional terms and the need for social elements like empathy and rapport-building in the health context. Using the Affective Response Model as a theoretical lens, we explore the social-transactional tension in user expectations of agent responses, based on a qualitative study with 8 participants. We found that a combination of social and transactional elements in agent responses is needed for the participants to feel understood. Furthermore, these two elements are mutually reinforcing reflecting a duality in the role of CAs as health advice agents. The duality is conceptualized through our theorization of Practical Empathy which defines four elements: consistency, progressivity, adaptability, and proactivity — as requirements for CAs to fulfill the expectation of the social-transactional duality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".