{"pk":50008,"title":"Empathy in Explanation","subtitle":null,"abstract":"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 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 modeling human intuitions about how a doctor should explain to a patient why they have a disease, depending on the patient's propensity for regret. Our model predicts human intuitions well, better than ablations suggestive that people do indeed reason about emotion when giving explanations. See https://sites.google.com/view/empathy-in-explanation for further details and pre-print.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Causal reasoning; Social cognition; Theory of Mind; Bayesian modeling; Computational Modeling"}],"section":"Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ss809vr","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Katherine","middle_name":"M","last_name":"Collins","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Kartik","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chandra","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Jonathan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ragan-Kelley","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Adrian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Weller","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Cambridge","department":""},{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"B.","last_name":"Tenenbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50008/galley/37970/download/"}]}