In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the device used to test whether someone is an android is the Voigt-Kampff test.
The test measures involuntary physical responses to questions designed to provoke empathy. In the novel, androids are difficult to distinguish from humans by appearance, so investigators rely on their supposedly limited emotional responses. Rick Deckard administers the test while hunting escaped androids in a ruined San Francisco.
Empathy is central to the novel’s moral problem. Humans treat empathy as evidence of personhood, yet the society also displays cruelty, status anxiety, and indifference toward living beings. The story therefore questions whether a technical test can fully establish who deserves moral concern.
Dick published the novel in 1968. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner was loosely based on it and uses the related fictional term “Voight-Kampff,” with a slightly different spelling. The Voigt-Kampff test should not be confused with Alan Turing’s real-world Turing test, which concerns machine intelligence and conversation.