Do humans grant moral consideration to anthropomorphic robots?

Abstract As robots are increasingly integrated into daily life, they take on subjective moral roles as agents, patients, or proxies. However, their status as moral patients, meaning entities deserving of moral concern, remains unclear. This study ( N = 606) used three experiments to examine how physical anthropomorphism and mind-based anthropomorphism influence moral judgments and decisions regarding harming robots. Experiment 1 manipulated physical anthropomorphism using visual stimuli in third-party moral dilemmas, finding that robots with high (vs. low) physical anthropomorphism received significantly less moral approval for utilitarian harm. Experiment 2, using text-based descriptions to manipulate the perception of mind attributes (experience and agency), replicated this finding, showing that high mind-based anthropomorphism also reduced moral approval for utilitarian harm. In both studies, moral judgments for high-anthropomorphism robots converged with those for human patients. Crucially, this effect in Experiment 2 was driven specifically by perceived experience (the capacity to feel), not by perceived agency (the capacity to act). In Experiment 3, a second-party moral decision-making task revealed that participants were less inclined to harm robots described with high experience for personal profit. A utility model confirmed this stemmed from increased harm aversion to robots, and a multi-attribute drift-diffusion model (DDM) linked this aversion to an increased sensitivity to harm-related information regarding robots. These findings suggest that perceived experience is the critical component of anthropomorphism that elevates robots’ moral status from plain tools to moral patients. These results offer critical insights for designers to create more effective human–robot interactions.