Authors
Boyoung Kim and Qin Zhu and Elizabeth Phillips and Tom Williams
Venue
IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts
Publication Year
2025
Mental states, such as beliefs, intentions, and desires, have been considered key elements of human agency, indicating one’s capacity to act deliberately and with awareness. Thus, these mental states have been treated as crucial factors in assessing human accountability. However, it remains unclear whether these mental states are equally important to robot agency and, by extension, to robot accountability. To explore this tension, we investigated how participants judged the relevance of mental states in determining the accountability.
of an industrial robotic arm or a humanoid robot compared
to a human after a workplace accident in which a worker
was injured. Our results showed that participants viewed
desires, beliefs, and intentions as significantly less relevant when
assessing the accountability of robots than humans, and robots
were judged as less accountable overall. These findings suggest
a need to move beyond human-centered views of agency–
particularly those based on assumptions about mental states–
when discussing the accountability of robots.
