Perceptions of Moral Patiency Across Social Robot Morphologies

Abstract

Evidence indicates humans can see robots as moral patients—entities worthy of moral consideration. Although there is evidence that related considerations (e.g., empathy, mentalizing) vary across robot shapes, it is not yet understood whether the perception of moral patiency (PMP, a social-moral status ascription) may differ across robot morphologies. This paper reports a content-analytic secondary analysis of elicited stories (N = 1,395 by 465 respondents; Banks, 2021) about how humans may treat social robots morally or immorally across 36 forms of PMP. Results indicate that the presence of PMP is largely non-different across anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and mechanomorphic robots. The exception is the Liberty-related notion of ceding resources to the robot (most likely for zoomorphic, though likely a matter of distancing oneself from the stimulus spider-shaped robot) and the Liberty-related notion of making robots free-by-design (most likely for anthropomorphic robots, potentially a matter of transferring valued states to a self-similar machine).