Abstract With the rapid progression of artificial intelligence (AI) development, artificial entities are increasingly making decisions in domains with human moral consequence, including in healthcare settings. Thus, it is crucial to understand how people perceive moral decisions made by AI compared to humans in healthcare. People at times perceive robots powered by AI and humans differently when making the same moral decisions, suggesting that people may hold robots to different moral standards than humans. The visual representation of robots may also affect how people perceive this technology in making moral decisions, with the potential for robots that are perceived as uncanny and approaching human-likeness to be judged as less moral. However, would this moral uncanny valley effect apply to moral dilemmas in healthcare? Past research has found uncanny valley effects in situations such as trolley problem dilemmas, but these dilemmas may differ heavily in terms of plausibility and outcome severity compared to ones in healthcare. Thus, this current study tasked participants with reading vignettes regarding human, human-like robot (i.e., android), and mechanical robot nurses making moral medical decisions regarding either forcefully medicating a patient or respecting the patient’s autonomy, and then rated theses nurses on moral acceptability, moral responsibility, warmth, competence, and trustworthiness. Overall, the mechanical robot nurses were rated lower in general than the human nurse, with the android and mechanical robot nurses being rated similarly. These results suggest that uncanny valley effects are not present in dilemmas involving patient autonomy, and that uncanny valley effects only arise in high-stake moral dilemmas.
Dunn et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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