Robots will increasingly take on roles in our social lives where they can cause humans harm. When robots do so, will people hold robots morally accountable? To investigate this question, 40 undergraduate students individually engaged in a 15-minute interaction with ATR's humanoid robot, Robovie. The interaction culminated in a situation where Robovie incorrectly assessed the participant's performance in a game, and prevented the participant from winning a $20 prize. Each participant was then interviewed in a 50-minute session. Results showed that all of the participants engaged socially with Robovie, and many of them conceptualized Robovie as having mental/emotional and social attributes. Sixtyfive percent of the participants attributed some level of moral accountability to Robovie. Statistically, participants held Robovie less accountable than they would a human, but more accountable than they would a vending machine. Results are discussed in terms of the New Ontological Category Hypothesis and robotic warfare.

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We as a species are losing rich and diverse forms of interaction with nature: the awe, for example, of encountering an animal in the wild or a slug underfoot, of sleeping under the night sky, or of even seeing the night sky in our urban settings. The loss is happening quickly (in terms of decades) and potentially impoverishing us as a species, physically and psychologically. Toward addressing this problem, we propose a new research agenda that is focused on generating what we are calling a Nature Language-a way of speaking about patterns of interactions between humans and nature and their wide range of instantiations, and the meaningful, deep, and often joyful feelings that they engender. Many of these patterns presumably emerged during the course of our evolutionary history. In this article, we share some of our initial thinking about a nature language so as to initiate dialog with the ecopsychology community. If a nature language project proves successful, it will allow people to speak more readily and comprehensively about what is beautiful in our relation with nature, and what is missing but still possible if we change course.

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As the HRI field evolves, researchers increasingly seek to provide characterizations of sociality in human-robot interaction. But how does one assess whether the characterizations are valid? Using design work on “interaction patterns” as a case in point, this paper offers 5 approaches toward establishing validity: psychometric, literary, modelling, philosophical, and structural. We argue that when it comes to validating characterizations of sociality in HRI, too often people ask for evidence of psychometric validity, without clarity of what that involves, and without awareness of the benefits of these other approaches.