# Empathy in Explanation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21081/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Building Machines that Learn and Think with People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03943/) (2024)
- [A Communication-First Account of Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03732/) (2025)
- [WatChat: Explaining perplexing programs by debugging mental models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05334/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 that 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 using it to model human intuitions about how a doctor might explain to a patient why they have a disease, taking into account the patient's propensity for regret. Our model predicts human intuitions well, better than emotion-agnostic ablations, suggesting that people do indeed reason about emotion when giving explanations.