Anat Perry is an associate professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she directs the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.
She was a 2025–2026 Helen Putnam Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Perry studies the mechanisms and boundaries of empathy and the role empathy plays in social relationships, decision-making, and wellbeing. Her research integrates behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, EEG, dyadic interaction paradigms, and field studies in healthcare and other real-world settings. Perry is a pioneer in the emerging field of human–AI empathy. Her work helped shift the field from asking whether AI can generate empathic language to examining how people experience, value, and respond to empathy attributed to humans and machines. She introduced the concept of the “artificial-empathy paradox,” which captures the finding that AI-generated empathy may be experienced as supportive but becomes less valued when recipients believe it comes from AI.
Her broader work investigates what makes human empathy distinctive and important, and how increasingly humanlike AI may transform empathy, relationships, loneliness, social cohesion, and wellbeing. Perry’s research has been published in leading journals, including Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Trends in Cognitive Science. She is an Associate Editor of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Perry is also co-editor, with Daryl Cameron, of Empathy and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges, Advances and Ethical Considerations, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. The interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, and related fields to examine the opportunities and risks created by artificial empathy. At the Berkman Klein Center, Perry will advance a broader research program on how AI is reshaping the human social experience. Her work asks when AI can support human connection and flourishing, and when it may undermine the distinctly human capacities and relationships on which individuals and societies depend.