The impact of action descriptions on attribution of moral responsibility towards robots

Abstract

In the era of renewed fascination with AI and robotics, one needs to address questions related to their societal impact, particularly in terms of moral responsibility and intentionality. In seven vignette-based experiments we investigated whether the consequences of a robot or human's actions, influenced participant's intentionality and moral responsibility ratings. For the robot, when the vignettes contained mentalistic descriptions, moral responsibility ratings were higher for negative actions consequences than positive action consequences, however, there was no difference in intentionality ratings. Whereas, for the human, both moral responsibility and intentionality ratings were higher for negative action consequences. Once the mentalistic descriptions were removed from the vignettes and the moral responsibility question was clarified, we found a reversed asymmetry. For both robots and humans, participants attributed more intentionality and praise, for positive action consequences than negative action consequences. We suggest that this reversal could be due to people defaulting to charitable explanations, when explicit references to culpable mental states are removed from the vignettes.