This scale measures how much a person believes an 'agent' tried to understand a customer and see things from the customer's point of view. The agent can be a human employee or an AI system such as a chatbot, in a customer service or sales role. Liu-Thompkins, Okazaki, and Li (2022) created the three items by adapting the wording of perspective-taking items from Davis's (1980, 1983) empathy measure so that they refer to an agent, and used them in a pilot study with 525 U.S. Qualtrics panel participants comparing human and chatbot customer service.
Not stated in the source article; Davis's (1980) original items used a 5-point scale (0 = does not describe me well, 4 = describes me well)
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
Alpha was .91 in the pilot study (n = 525; Liu-Thompkins, Okazaki, and Li 2022, p. 1209). A CFA with several other multi-item measures (Web Appendix 3) supported the scale's convergent and discriminant validity; AVE was a strong .77. The response format was not described by the authors. Items were adapted from three perspective-taking items in Davis (1980, 1983) and reworded to refer to an agent. 'Agent' can be replaced with a more specific term (e.g., 'This chatbot', 'This employee'). See also Interpersonal Reactivity Index (ID 16) and Perspective-Taking of the Team (ID 90477).
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.
Free access to 2581+ psychometric scales at PsychScales