Yoel and Mickey welcome their University of Toronto colleague and close friend, psychologist Elizabeth Page-Gould. Liz, who is an expert in close friendship, tries to help Yoel and Mickey fall in love with each other…and with her…by administering the so-called fast-friends procedure. By answering questions of increasing intimacy and revealing personal stories, Yoel, Mickey, and Liz grow in rapport over the course of the hour, sometimes uncovering deep emotions. Bonus: Yoel and Mickey discuss a new paper in Science Magazine suggesting that judgments of blue dots can help us understand the advent of concepts such as micro-aggressions.
When researchers asked people whether they’d rather get an empathetic response from a human or from AI, human responses won by a wide margin. When the same researchers actually showed them the responses, AI won by a wider one. People who said they preferred human responses rated the AI replies as more empathetic, more validating, and even better at making them feel heard.
The most recent evidence comes from a Penn State and University of Toronto team led by Joshua Wenger, published in January in Communications Psychology. Across four studies, participants were given the choice between receiving an empathetic response from a human or from ChatGPT. They picked humans 57% to 62% of the time.
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