  As AI technologies progress, social acceptance of AI agents, including
intelligent virtual agents and robots, is becoming even more important for more
applications of AI in human society. One way to improve the relationship
between humans and anthropomorphic agents is to have humans empathize with the
agents. By empathizing, humans act positively and kindly toward agents, which
makes it easier for them to accept the agents. In this study, we focus on
self-disclosure from agents to humans in order to increase empathy felt by
humans toward anthropomorphic agents. We experimentally investigate the
possibility that self-disclosure from an agent facilitates human empathy. We
formulate hypotheses and experimentally analyze and discuss the conditions in
which humans have more empathy toward agents. Experiments were conducted with a
three-way mixed plan, and the factors were the agents' appearance (human,
robot), self-disclosure (high-relevance self-disclosure, low-relevance
self-disclosure, no self-disclosure), and empathy before/after a video
stimulus. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed using data from 918
participants. We found that the appearance factor did not have a main effect,
and self-disclosure that was highly relevant to the scenario used facilitated
more human empathy with a statistically significant difference. We also found
that no self-disclosure suppressed empathy.These results support our
hypotheses. This study reveals that self-disclosure represents an important
characteristic of anthropomorphic agents which helps humans to accept them.
