Justifications of Moral Responsibility Attribution towards a Humanoid Robot

As robots increasingly participate in society it is crucial to understand which factors influence the degree to which individuals attribute moral responsibility towards them. In a previously reported study, participants read vignettes about a humanoid robot causing either a negative or a positive consequence. Participants rated the moral responsibility and intentionality of the robot, and explained the reasoning behind their ratings. In this paper we (1) conducted an exploratory cluster analysis on their textual justifications of their moral responsibility ratings using word-embeddings and (2) investigated the correlation between moral responsibility ratings and the proportion of words participants use from each cluster. We found that participants who used more words from the “event detection” cluster were more likely to attribute higher moral responsibility to the humanoid robot. Conversely, those who used more words from the “mechanistic properties” cluster tended to attribute less moral responsibility to the humanoid robot. These findings illustrate that moral responsibility attributions could be influenced by the proportion to which individuals refer to events and mechanistic properties.