17-04-2025
AI or Human: Which is a Better Listener?
Computer with woman connecting brain and heart. Creating empathic and logical thinking.
I conducted a poll.
It was very informal and completely unscientific. I didn't use any digital devices or spreadsheets, or even a pencil and paper. All I did was tally people's reactions to the sight of my right hand wrapped in a bright purple cast, the result of an inopportune fall. It wasn't very difficult. My poll produced a perfect score: 100% of the people who saw the cast responded by telling me about their experience with a cast or a hairline fracture; none expressed any empathy for my discomfort.
Chances are you've experienced the same when you showed up with conspicuous evidence of a medical treatment like a bandage or eye patch. You hear their point of view not yours.
Had I sought a reaction from an AI companion such as, Xiaoice, the responses would have been very different, or so Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, tells us. In a Wall Street Journal article based on his book, 'Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness,' Professor Zaki reported that chatbots do 'a better job than humans at making people feel seen and heard.' The reason, he explained, is that bots have 'no personal experiences to share, no urgency to solve problems and no ego to protect, they focus entirely on the speaker. Their inherent limitations make them better listeners.'
That's good news for AI and bad news for humans. Because no matter how powerful AI becomes, humans must communicate with humans. If that interpersonal exchange lacks empathy, if the communication is only one way—the point of view of the sender—there is no closing of the loop and no communication. The communication is likely to fail.
Of course, the stakes in business are much higher that the petty annoyance one might feel when the opposite party drones on and on about their similar medical experience.
The solution for all your business communications—whether in a meeting or team chat or a presentation—is for you to display empathy to the other party as effectively as a chatbot does. Professor Zaki tells us that ChatGPT has a 'go-to recipe of 'paraphrase, affirm, follow up.''
For humans, it takes four similar steps:
Professor Zaki calls the effective responses of chatbots 'LLMpathy' because they are driven by Large Language Models.
Human empathy is driven by an even stronger force: the brain.
