Extending the Moral Template for Service Robots: an Examination of Reactions to Robots as Moral Judges

This study examines morality issues with respect to one understudied role of service robots: the service robot as a moral judge. A main tenet is that robots’ moral judgments of human behavior invite us humans to compare such judgments with our own judgments, and it is hypothesized that the resulting level of human-to-robot similarity influences evaluations of robots. This hypothesis was confirmed in an experiment. The results also show that the impact of human-to-robot similarity on robot evaluations was mediated by attribution of morality to the robot and trust. The net result was that human-to-robot similarity boosted the evaluation of the robot.