2184: Sweep My Mistakes Under the Rug: Social Robots as Enablers of Immoral Behavior in Human-Robot Joint (13516)

People commonly desire to have a positive self-image and social image, but they may occasionally engage in immoral behaviors (e.g., responsibility-deflection) when facing moral dilemmas involving conflicts of interest. Today, social robots are widely applied in our lives, and they perform peer roles in many businesses. However, knowledge regarding whether and to what extent robot peers enable humans to engage in immoral acts (e.g., deflecting their responsibility) during human-robot joint actions is limited, particularly in situations where human responsibility leads to failures. This research evaluated responsibility-deflection experiments on human-robot joint actions involving adults and children. First, we find robots to be enablers of the immoral behavior of adults, namely, adults are likely to exhibit more immoral intentions with robot peers than with human peers. Furthermore, as people perceive a robot with lower anthropomorphism, immoral intentions tend to increase. Second, in this study involving 9- to 11-year-old children, we show that children resist the enabler effect. We further theorize that interaction with robots (vs. humans) evokes a decreased feeling of guilt as well as pressure, and ultimately increases immoral intentions. Our evaluation of social robots, functioning as peers to adults, demonstrates the development of robots and raises concerns about adults’ comparatively increased immoral behaviors; thus, the potential impact of the enabler effect in organizations cannot be ignored.

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