Moral psychology
Does a robot's creepiness change how we judge its moral choices?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When creepy-looking robots made the choice to sacrifice one person to save many, people judged that choice as less moral than when a human or a friendly-looking robot made it, but the pattern reversed for choices not to act.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Study 1: preregistered 2 (utilitarian vs deontological decision) x 5 (four robots of varying uncanniness vs a human) between-subjects online experiment; Study 2: 2 x 4 between-subjects lab experiment with CGI human-robot morphs
- N
- N=624 · Study 1: 624 Prolific participants after exclusions; Study 2: 221 adults recruited at a public library in Espoo, Finland
- Population
- English-fluent online adults (Study 1) and Finnish public-library visitors aged 18-80 (Study 2)
- Outcome
- Rated morality of the agent's decision across high-conflict trolley-type dilemmas (1-7 scale); agent creepiness, mind perception and baseline morality as checks and covariates
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Key findings
In Study 1, the type of decision had a large effect, while agent appearance mattered only in interaction with it: utilitarian decisions formed a 'valley', rated least moral for the two creepiest robots, whereas deontological decisions formed an unexpected 'mountain', rated most moral for those same robots. Controlling for creepiness removed the valley for utilitarian decisions, but controlling for mind perception did not, suggesting the effect is not simply about how much mind the robot seems to have. Study 2's stylised CGI images produced no effects at all.
Methodology
In a preregistered online study, 624 adults saw a photo of either a human or one of four real robots that varied in how creepy they looked, rated the agent's mind and creepiness, and then read high-conflict trolley-type dilemmas in which that agent either acted to sacrifice one person (utilitarian) or refused to act (deontological). They rated how moral each decision was. A second lab study with 221 library visitors repeated the idea using computer-generated human-robot morph images.
Limitations
The appearance effects were small and several contrasts were only just significant, and the author states the studies are not highly powered one-off results needing independent replication. The mountain-shaped deontological effect was not preregistered and was driven mainly by one robot that was not the creepiest. Only four robot photos were used, so the results may reflect particular images rather than uncanniness in general, and Study 2 shows the effect disappears with non-photorealistic stimuli. Participants judged hypothetical vignettes, which may not reflect reactions to real robots.
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