Moral Narratives of Robots Increase the Likelihood of Adopting the Intentional Stance

This study investigated whether mentalistic text-vignettes of a robot enhances participants’ tendency to adopt the intentional stance. We also investigated whether the valence of a robot's action consequence influences judgements of intentionality and moral responsibility. We presented participants with scenarios from the InStance Test before and after they read the mentalistic text-vignettes. We found that InStance scores were significantly higher after they read the text-vignettes, implying an increased likelihood of adopting the intentional stance. This effect may have arisen from the mentalistic description of the robot, which could have primed participants to mentally simulate its experiences. Additionally, we found that the valence of a robot's action consequence did not significantly affect ratings of intentionality, which replicates previous results. However, unlike previous studies the valence of the action consequence did not affect moral responsibility ratings. Future studies could investigate (1) how the appearance of a robot influences moral responsibility judgements and (2) if text-vignettes using mechanistic descriptions modulate the tendency to adopt the intentional stance.