Systematic methods for Moral HRI: Studying human responses to robot norm conflicts

Abstract

Robots are increasingly taking on roles in contexts in which ethical decision making is necessary. In this paper, we offer a set of tools to study one central capacity of future moral robots: to have norm competence and, in particular, to make acceptable decisions when moral norms conflict with one another. Our efforts are in line with growing trends in the community to create and share systematic and replicable methods as well as validated testbeds, measures, and open datasets. Specifically, we propose four principal requirements for systematic research on human responses to robots’ choices to resolve norm conflicts and on their sequelae---human moral judgments, potential loss of trust, and robot mitigations to regain that trust. We also share a series of validated testbeds in the form of moral dilemmas. We detail our procedures and results of a human-subjects experiment (N=1,573) to validate these moral dilemmas as demonstrating high levels of norm conflict and thus well suited to study human-robot interaction in light of such norm conflicts. From these efforts we provide for the community an integrated framework of methodological tools for Moral HRI.