Moral Machines: Identifying Cues of Humanness that Influence Judgments of Robot Morality

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Recent years have seen marked growth in research across a range of disciplines on the moral psychology of decision-making machines. This is not surprising given that many important decision-making powers have been delegated to machines in a variety of morally-relevant contexts (e.g., hospital triage protocols). There remains, however, considerable popular reluctance to embrace moral decision making machines, despite the possibility of significant societal benefits. For this reason, researchers have sought to gain a greater understanding of the psychology underlying such attitudes. One critical component of the public's trust in machine decision makers is the degree to which people mentally analogize the machine to a human. Indeed, a growing focus in HRI research is on creating machines that display `social intelligence,' i.e., can interact with humans in ways that humans find seamless and engaging. To that end, my research team and I, with collaborators at the University of Toronto Autonomous Systems and Biomechatronics Lab in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, are proposing to manipulate psychological features of robots that influence humans' perceptions of the robots' humanness in three moral decision contexts (sacrificial dilemmas, asset allocation, and prisoner's dilemma scenarios). To do so, my students, colleagues, and I will call upon recent psychological models to manipulate robot interactants along four dimensions of psychological humanness:  (1) Autonomy (2) Social Connection, (3) Self-Aware Emotions, and (4) Values/Moral Principles. In the proposed studies, participants will interact with a robot that has been programmed to vary randomly along one or more of these dimensions. I am well-positioned to conduct the proposed research. I am an experimental social psychologist with 20 years of publications in moral psychology. Whereas much of the research on human-robot interaction has been conducted by mechanical engineers and computer scientists, I can offer an up-to-date perspective on the `human' side of the human-robot interface. In addition, the University of Toronto possesses a unique mechanism for collaboration between engineers and psychologists. I am a charter member of the Psychology and Engineering collaborative specialization, a Masters/PhD program of the Department of Psychology and the Departments of Civil & Mineral Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering. and Mechanical & Industrial Engineering. This program has spurred several Engineering-Psychology research collaborations in areas such as human factors and psychology-informed design. I currently serve on PhD committees of four students in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE). One MIE student from the laboratory of Dr. Goldie Nejat is an active participant in my laboratory.