Social good & healthUnited Kingdom+4 clusters01
AI chatbots matched human emotional support in everyday situations
Five studies involving 1,233 participants compared responses from ChatGPT 4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and human participants across everyday, non-clinical emotional situations. The AI responses were rated as more supportive for anger and fear, performed about as well as people for sadness, and still helped when recipients correctly suspected they came from a machine. The strongest factor was not generic validation but specific, actionable guidance.