Design and Evaluation of an Adaptive Empathy Learning Tool

Empathy is an elementary skill for daily interactions and for professional communication, agile teamwork and successful leadership and thus elementary for educational curricula. However, educational organizations face difficulties in providing the boundary conditions necessary for their students to develop empathy skills due to the lack of individual support in traditional large-scale and growing distance-learning scenarios. Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we propose an adaptive empathy learning tool that helps students develop their ability to react to other people’s observed experiences through individual feedback in large-scale or distance learning scenarios. Based on a design science research project, we propose a set of design principles and instantiate and evaluate them with our prototype Eva in an online experiment with 65 students. The findings suggest that an adaptive empathy learning tool that follows our design principles is a promising approach to individually support students in their ability to react to other people’s observed abilities in traditional learning scenarios.