When a friend is feeling a little down, we want to do something to help them. It’s an immediate reaction. But the creators of a chatbot called Vincent show us a new perspective. By turning things around and having a friend help us with something instead, we can make them feel better about themselves.
Image courtesy of Pexels, Toa Heftiba Sinca
A chatbot named Vincent is showing us a novel perspective on what it means to be there for a friend going through a bit of a rough patch. We should give them the opportunity to be there for us instead. The chatbot was named Vincent after the troubled soul and painter Vincent van Gogh. It was designed by a group of Dutch researcher from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) for use in health care. Caring for another as a way to care for ourselves, quite a novel perspective?
Being a good friend
So, the researchers set out to explore the emotional effect on a person when they spoke daily with someone who needed support. To find out what the emotional effect on people would be. Thus, Vincent would talk about some of his daily problems that had upset ‘him’.
TU/e researcher Minha Lee explained that they had worked with two versions of the chatbot. One was the one that shared its own daily life struggles during conversations. For example, by telling that he had been late in paying his server fee or had failed a programming test. Or, ‘to his shame,’ had arrived at the wrong IP address.
And so, Lee told us: “The Vincent who asked for advice or help increased people’s self-compassion more than the Vincent who gave people advice.”
More compassionate with ourselves
Lee also spoke to the university’s magazine. She said: “It turned out that [care-needing] Vincent had a positive effect on the way the test subjects viewed themselves.” Lee further explained that feeling concerned about another, encouraged them to be more compassionate with, and less hard on themselves. “They realised they weren’t the only ones with problems,” she added.
We know it feels good to do good, some people even call it a ‘helper’s high‘. We also know that many of us are not always that compassionate towards ourselves. And thus, Vincent the chatbot could shed new light on what it means to be a good friend. By letting them have these feelings too.
“The Vincent who asked for advice or help increased people’s self-compassion more than the Vincent who gave people advice.”
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