Empathic Concern of the Agent

What it measures

This scale measures a customer's belief that a service agent — human or AI-based — was compassionate and tried to make the customer feel better. Liu-Thompkins, Okazaki, and Li (2022) used it in the same pilot study, again drawing on conceptual material from empathy research rather than adapting specific items directly.

Response format

Likert-type scale (response format not described)

Scale items

• This agent recognized the customer's emotions.
• This agent expressed concerns about the customer's experience.
• This agent tried to make the customer feel better.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

The scale's alpha was .86 (Liu-Thompkins, Okazaki, and Li 2022, p. 1209). A CFA supported convergent and discriminant validity (AVE = .67, Web Appendix 3). Although the authors parenthetically cited Davis (1983) and McBane (1995), the item wording shows little clear similarity, suggesting the scale was created by the authors rather than adapted directly. The response format was not described; Davis's (1980) original empathic-concern measure used a five-point scale from 'Does not describe me well' (0) to 'Describes me well' (4).

Citation

Liu-Thompkins, Yuping, Shintaro Okazaki, and Hairong Li (2022), "Artificial Empathy in Marketing Interactions: Bridging the Human-AI Gap in Affective and Social Customer Experience," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 50 (6), 1198–1218.

Keywords