Cognitive empathy, the ability to understand others' perspectives, is essential for effective communication, reducing biases, and constructive negotiation. However, this skill is declining in a performance-driven society, which prioritizes efficiency over perspective-taking. Here, the training of cognitive empathy is challenging because it is a subtle, hard-to-perceive soft skill. To address this, we developed CoEmpaTeam, a VR-based system that enables users to train their cognitive empathy by using LLM-driven avatars with different personalities. Through dynamic role play, users actively engage in perspective-taking, experiencing situations through another person's eyes. CoEmpaTeam deploys three avatars who significantly differ in their personality, validated by a technical evaluation and an online experiment (n=90). Next, we evaluated the system through a lab experiment with 32 participants who performed three sessions across two weeks, followed by a one-week diary study. Our results showed a significant increase in cognitive empathy, which, according to participants, transferred into their real lives.
@article{arxiv.2603.16614,
title = {CoEmpaTeam: Enhancing Cognitive Empathy using LLM-based Avatars and Dynamic Role Play in Virtual Reality},
author = {Dehui Kong and Martin Feick and Shi Liu and Alexander Maedche},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.16614},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted to appear in the Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026)