Compassion is an important human value that is essential for enhancing human relations, supporting well-being, and promoting mutual respect. With the growing development and integration of social robots, compassionate elements are intentionally being embedding into robot design to cultivate more empathetic human-robot interaction. However, this development raises critical questions about how such design choices may shape human perceptions and behaviors, especially in moral contexts involving ethical and prosocial decision-making. This concern is especially salient given the limited literature synthesizing existing approaches to conceptualizing compassion and examining its relevance to the ethical design and evaluation of social robots. To further reflect on the responsible design of social robots with compassionate features, this paper (1) offers a conceptual analysis of compassion grounded in literature from philosophy, psychology, and education; (2) presents a framework to synthesize the different ways in which social robots have been designed to contribute to compassion based on prior literature in human-robot interac-tion; and (3) leverages the Design for Values framework and other existing approaches to present concrete strategies for operationalizing the integration of compassion in social robot design that may be empirically evaluated in future work. This paper concludes with reflections on potential technical challenges and ethical implications associated with integrating compassion into social robots, particularly focusing on education as an example.
Bejarano et al. (Fri,) studied this question.