Preliminary Investigation of Moral Expansiveness for Robots

To clarify whether humans can extend moral care and consideration to robotic entities, a psychological experiment was conducted for twenty-five undergraduate and graduate students in Japan. The experiment consisted of two conditions on a robot’s behavior: relational and non-relational. In the experiment participants interacted with the robot and then they were told that the robot was disposed. It was found that 1) the participants having higher expectation of rapport with the robot showed more moral expansiveness for the robot measured as degrees of reasoning about the robot as having mental states, a social other, and a moral other, in comparison with those having lower expectation, and 2) in the group of the participants having lower expectation of rapport with the robot, those facing to the robot with relational behaviors showed more degrees of reasoning about the robot as a social other in comparison with those facing the robot without these behaviors.