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Perceived Moral Patiency of Social Robots: Explication and Scale Development

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Abstract

As robots are increasingly integrated into human social spheres, they will be put in situations in which they may be perceived as moral patients—the actual or possible targets of humans’ (im)moral actions by which they may realize some benefit or suffering. However, little is understood about this potential, in part due to a lack of operationalization for measuring humans’ perceptions of machine moral patiency. This paper explicates the notion of perceived moral patiency (PMP) of robots and reports the results of three studies that develop a scale for measuring robot PMP and explore its measurements with relevant social dynamics. We ultimately present an omnibus six-factor scale, with each factor capturing the extent to which people believe a robot deserves a specific kind of moral consideration as specified by moral foundations theory (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, liberty). The omnibus PMP scale’s factor structure is robust across both in-principle and in-context evaluations, and measures contextualized (local) PMP as distinct from heuristic (global) PMP.

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Notes

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8YjvHYbZ9w, at timestamp 0:27.

  2. https://www.engineeredarts.co.uk/robot/robothespian/.

  3. https://wiki.engineeredarts.co.uk/Projected_Face.

  4. We also report chi-square goodness of fit for completeness but note that the null hypothesis tested (that the observed data is a “perfect fit” for specified model) is rarely supported in CFA [45]).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Jaime Banks

  2. College of Media & Communication, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

    Jaime Banks

  3. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Nicholas David Bowman

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Correspondence to Jaime Banks.

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This material is based upon work supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-19-1-006. The authors thank Kevin Koban and Brad Haggadone, who were collaborators on the larger study from which Study 3 data was drawn. Thanks also to the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech, where a portion of this work was completed. The authors have no relevant (non-)financial interests to declare. All materials for this research are freely available at https://osf.io/w8vre/. The TTU Human Research Protection Program acknowledged these procedures as exempt under protocols IRB2020-3287 and IRB2021-80; informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, some data analysis, and most manuscript writing were performed by JB. Most data analysis and manuscript editing were performed by NDB. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Banks, J., Bowman, N. Perceived Moral Patiency of Social Robots: Explication and Scale Development. Int J of Soc Robotics 15, 101–113 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00950-6

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