Breaking the Typecast? Moral Status and Trust in Robotic Moral Patients

Abstract

Given that perceived moral status is key to how people accept others, past scholarship has investigated the role of moral agency in human-robot interaction. However, little empirical work attends to dynamics of moral patiency—the extent to which robots are seen as deserving moral consideration. This investigation addresses two questions: (1) What is the relationship between perceived moral agency (PMA) and perceived moral patiency (PMP) when robots are positioned as moral patients and (2) (how) is PMP associated with trust in a robot? An online experiment explored these questions as people reacted to a robot being subjected to humans’ (im)moral actions. Findings show that PMP is positively linked to PMA (against the moral typecasting hypothesis) and trust, robust to context/valence.