The Role of Animism Tendencies and Empathy in Adult Evaluations of Robot

We investigated whether Japanese adults' beliefs about friendship and morality toward robots differing in appearance (i.e., humanoid, dog-like, and egg-shaped) related to their animism tendencies and empathy. University students responded to questionnaires regarding three animism tendencies (i.e., general animism or a tendency to believe souls or gods in nonliving things, aliveness animism or a tendency to consider nonliving things as live entities, and agentic animisms or a tendency to attribute biological, artifactual, psychological, perceptual, and naming properties) and empathy. We found that friendship and morality were related to slightly different animism tendencies and empathy even though they shared some major factors. Aliveness animism, as well as a tendency to attribute perceptual and name properties toward robots, might be necessary for an individual to believe that robots could be social agents. Participants who responded that robots could be their friends showed a tendency to feel a soul in manmade objects and a strong self-oriented emotional reactivity, whereas participants who answered that robots were moral beings showed a tendency to exhibit strong emotional susceptibility. We discuss implications of these results and reasons why people feel that robots have a mind or consciousness.

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