Chatbot Empathy That Sounds Fake: Hollow Empathy
Frequency:Occasional
Category:Human Machine Interface
Emotional Intelligence
1 patterns for this issue
Goal: Users feel heard because the bot reflects their actual situation and then acts on it.
Why this family exists
Empathy works when it is specific and attached to action. Stock phrases signal that nobody is listening.
How we measure it
Shared metrics the patterns below report against. Targets are starting points to tune on your own data, unless a source is given.
| Metric | Target | Defined in |
|---|---|---|
| Specificity rate of empathy lines | Over 90% on complaint messages | hollow empathy (GitHub) |
| Repeated empathy phrase rate | Under 2% | hollow empathy (GitHub) |
Patterns
| Pattern | One line |
|---|---|
| Hollow empathy (GitHub) | ‘I understand your frustration’, on repeat, with no action |
Planned (not yet written)
- Missed subtext
- Fixing before listening