Was that research into violent FPS video games per chance? And if that research showed no correlation between players of those games and their behavior in the real world (I can't remember if it did or not, or if it was inconclusive), I wonder what the difference is between that and interacting with things like chatbots? Is it because gamers have a hard line differentiation between real world and the game world that keeps actions in the latter from contaminating the former? And interacting with a chatbot is too similar to interacting to a human via a messenger application?

No, I wasn't thinking of that - I was thinking explicitly of how treating "inanimate objects" poorly tends to decrease empathy for other people as well.