Comment by cootsnuck

I can’t tell if you’re being disingenuous, but the very first sentence of the abstract literally says the word "simulate":

> Recent technological advancements have empowered nonhuman entities, such as virtual assistants and humanoid robots, to simulate human intelligence and behavior.

In the paper, "socio-emotional capability" is serving as a behavioral/operational label. Specifically, the ability to understand, express, and respond to emotions. It's used to study perceptions and spillovers. That's it.

The authors manipulate perceived socio-emotional behavior and measure how that shifts human judgments and treatment of others.

Whether that behavior is "illusory" or phenomenally real is orthogonal to the research scope and doesn’t change the results. But regardless, as I said, they quite literally said "simulate", so you should still be satisfied.