Perception of an Uncertain Ethical Reasoning Robot: A Pilot Study

The study investigates the effect of uncertainty expressed by a robot facing a moral dilemma. Participants (N = 80) were shown a video of a robot explaining a moral dilemma and the decision it makes. The robot either expressed certainty or uncertainty about its decision. Participants rated how much blame the robot deserves for its action, themoral wrongness of the action, and their impression of the robot in terms of four scale dimensions measuring social perception. The results suggest that participants that were not familiar with the moral dilemma assign more blame to the robot for the same action when it expresses uncertainty, while expressed uncertainty has less effect onmoral wrongness judgments. There was no significant effect of expressed uncertainty on participants’ impression of the robot. We discuss implications of this result for the design of social robots.

[1]  E. Uhlmann,et al.  A Person-Centered Approach to Moral Judgment , 2015, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[2]  Erwin Marsi,et al.  Expressing uncertainty with a talking head in a multimodal question-answering system , 2007 .

[3]  M. Swerts,et al.  Audiovisual prosody and feeling of knowing , 2005 .

[4]  Dana Kulic,et al.  Measurement Instruments for the Anthropomorphism, Animacy, Likeability, Perceived Intelligence, and Perceived Safety of Robots , 2009, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[5]  M. Brewer,et al.  A schematic model of dispositional attribution in interpersonal perception. , 1979 .

[6]  Geoffrey P. Goodwin,et al.  Moral character predominates in person perception and evaluation. , 2014, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  Takayuki Kanda,et al.  Do people hold a humanoid robot morally accountable for the harm it causes? , 2012, 2012 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[8]  Bertram F. Malle,et al.  Moral judgments of human vs. robot agents , 2016, 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[9]  J. Thomson.  The Trolley Problem , 1985 .

[10]  Matthias Scheutz,et al.  Which robot am I thinking about? The impact of action and appearance on people's evaluations of a moral robot , 2016, 2016 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[11]  L. Kohlberg.  Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization , 1969 .

[12]  Steven J. Stroessner,et al.  The Robotic Social Attributes Scale (RoSAS): Development and Validation , 2017, 2017 12th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI.

[13]  E. Langer,et al.  The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of "Placebic" Information in Interpersonal Interaction , 1978 .

[14]  H. H. Clark,et al.  On the Course of Answering Questions , 1993 .

[15]  Claudia Wagner,et al.  Anthropomorphic inferences from emotional nonverbal cues: A case study , 2010, 19th International Symposium in Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[16]  J. Haidt.  The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. , 2001, Psychological review.

[17]  M. Hauser,et al.  The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment , 2006, Psychological science.

[18]  Anne M. Scheel,et al.  Equivalence Testing for Psychological Research: A Tutorial , 2018, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.

[19]  Eric Luis Uhlmann,et al.  Moral signals, public outrage, and immaterial harms , 2011 .

[20]  Felix Lindner,et al.  The Hybrid Ethical Reasoning Agent IMMANUEL , 2017, HRI.

[21]  Felix Lindner,et al.  Discussions about lying with an ethical reasoning robot , 2017, 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[22]  Peter Salovey,et al.  Asymmetry in Judgments of Moral Blame and Praise , 2003, Psychological science.