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.
@article{arxiv.2507.21081,
title = {Empathy in Explanation},
author = {Katherine M. Collins and Kartik Chandra and Adrian Weller and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley and Joshua B. Tenenbaum},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.21081},
year = {2025}
}