Responsibility gaps and self-interest bias: People attribute moral responsibility to AI for their own but not others' transgressions

Abstract

In the last decade, the ambiguity and difficulty of responsibility attribution to AI and human stakeholders (i.e., responsibility gaps) has been increasingly relevant and discussed in extreme cases (e.g., autonomous weapons). On top of related philosophical debates, the current research provides empirical evidence on the importance of bridging responsibility gaps from a psychological and motivational perspective. In three pre-registered studies (N = 1259), we examined moral judgments in hybrid moral situations, where both a human and an AI were involved as moral actors and arguably responsible for a moral consequence. We found that people consistently showed a self-interest bias in the evaluation of hybrid transgressions, such that they judged the human actors more leniently when they were depicted as themselves (vs. others; Studies 1 and 2) and ingroup (vs. outgroup; Study 3) members. Moreover, this bias did not necessarily emerge when moral actors caused positive (instead of negative) moral consequences (Study 2), and could be accounted for by the flexible responsibility attribution to AI (i.e., ascribing more responsibility to AI when judging the self rather than others; Studies 1 and 2). The findings suggest that people may dynamically exploit the “moral wiggle room” in hybrid moral situations and reason about AI's responsibility to serve their self-interest.