No abstract

We live in an age where robots are increasingly present in the social and moral world. Here, we explore how children and adults think about the mental lives and moral standing of robots. In Experiment 1 (N = 116), we found that children granted humans and robots with more mental life and vulnerability to harm than an anthropomorphized control (i.e., a toy bear). In Experiment 2 (N = 157), we found that, relative to children, adults ascribed less mental life and vulnerability to harm to robots. In Experiment 3 (N = 152), we modified our experiment to be within-subjects and measured beliefs concerning moral standing. Though younger children again appeared willing to assign mental capacities — particularly those related to experience (e.g., being capable of experiencing hunger) — to robots, older children and adults did so to a lesser degree. This diminished attribution of mental life tracked with diminished ratings of robot moral standing. This informs ongoing debates concerning emerging attitudes about artificial life.

45same direction), interpretation of scores is not complicated by admixtures of favorable and unfavorable items and different directions of keying in the same scale. When a respondent exaggerates or deemphasizes either favorable or unfavorable attributes, tlhe levels of his scores relative to norms clearly show the trends of his test behavior, and Ss who attempt to "fake good" are easily detected.The scale has proven useful as a brief screening instrument in its own right and as a supplemental self-report instrument when used in conjunction with larger questionnaires or projective techniques. I n addition it has the advantage of containing many different statements that pertain to characteristics of general clinical interest. Because it is brief, it is convenient for an examiner who wants to '(know what a person said", to look at the ratings for each statement and thereby gain a clinical impression of the kind of content being stressed or deeniphasized by the respondent. REFERENCES 1. BLOCK, J. The Challenge of Response Sets: Unconfounding meaning, acquiescence, and social desirability in the MMPZ.